Hygiene hang-ups

WHEN AUSTRALIAN Olympic official John Coates accused the British of being soap-dodgers last week, he was invoking a murky tradition that dates well before this summer's outbreak of Aussie versus Pom verbal mudslinging

Casting aspersions on others by questioning their personal hygiene is a habit that's almost as old as the concept of hygiene itself.

Team GB's efforts in the gleaming Beijing Water Cube were not bad "for a country that has very few swimming pools and not much soap", was what Coates actually said, not long after the impeccably shampooed British swimmer Rebecca Adlington had taken gold in the 400m freestyle.

So accustomed to dealing similar insults to the "smelly" French, The Suntreated the remark with faux-outrage, prompting Melbourne newspaper The Age to note that the British tabloids had "worked themselves up into a predictable lather" over this hygiene crack.

The first Olympic Games in 776 BC was a military thanksgiving and purification ceremony dedicated to Zeus - no person could go armed or unclean to the Games, historian Virginia Smith writes in her new book Clean: a history of personal hygiene and purity.

Fast forward to the 18th century and physicians were advocating muscular vigour as the best method to "carry off the poisons quicker and brace the solids to perform their proper actions". A healthy body meant a healthy mind.

Regular cold baths were also hailed as the panacea for all disease, including breast cancer, by the religious puritans, while in the "well-staffed nurseries of the rich", English children showing signs of rickets were frequently immersed in cold water. Unlike the Olympic swimmers, it was not by choice.

Anyone who considers the modern popular "cleanse, tone and moisturise" beauty mantra to be strangely complex - what does toning achieve anyway? - could do well to dive into Smith's wide-ranging book.

It traces the global history of personal body care from the days when cleansing meant nothing more than survival, to the Marie Antoinette-esque fashion for vermin-infested stacks of hair, before eventually arriving at the 21st century "hygiene hypothesis", which claims that children who live in completely disinfected environments have weaker immune systems than those who don't.

But even if it is possible that we have become "too clean for our own good", the soaps and shower gels of today's supermarket shelves are far too sophisticated to be bothered about anything as basic as warding off disease. You're far more likely to find a bottle of body lotion talking up its ability to hydrate, energise, relax, exfoliate, enrich, firm, smooth, soften or invigorate the skin than you are to find the word "clean".

It's all a long way from what Smith calls the "medical hard sell" of the mid-20th century, when soap became the subject of the first-ever television advert and "whiter than white" detergents stressed their "fresh" smells. A "pastel-coloured soft sell" began from the 1970s, with "antiseptic" scents replaced by floral essences and later powerful herbal, spice and fruit scents.

But advertising slots once reserved for household cleaners have now been taken over by cosmetics - the "underbelly" of personal hygiene, according to Smith. Despite forming an essential part of personal healthcare since the Bronze Age, they have often been reviled as dirty and unwholesome.

In 18th century France, cosmetics and sexual impurity were explicitly linked when aristocrats employed white, red and yellow greasepaints and rouge powders to disguise syphilitic disfigurements.

It was Protestant England that had all the real hang-ups in the late 1700s, however. The virtuous may have frowned upon heavy painting, but Christian chasteness created its own personal hygiene issues with "a general silence" on menstruation prompting the physician William Buchan to note that "there are no women in the world so inattentive to this discharge as the English; and they suffer accordingly".

But the English colonists also learnt that perfect bodily cleanliness was essential to their authority. Habits such as the Indian champu or "shampoo" massage were picked up and brought back home. In the 19th century, soap and water was the only acceptable beauty regime for unmarried English women. After Gladstone abolished soap tax in 1852, there was certainly plenty of the stuff around.

It is not hard to pick out echoes of Smith's account of cleanliness and "moral purity" in today's attitudes toward cosmetics. But men who say they like their women free of make-up are often wearily dismissed by women's magazines, who retort that what they really mean when they say they prefer "the natural look" is usually the carefully contrived result of a moisturising layer, subtly tinted base, non-shine powder, tinted lashes and transparent lip gloss. A whole lot of chemicals are used in the application of this "no make-up make-up". On the other hand, streaky or overt fake tan is branded less than classy and, in this activity, the sun-deprived British and Irish must be gold medal champions compared with their naturally sun-kissed Australian cousins.

Meanwhile, people who breach the assumed cleanliness standards of their class are held up as freaks. The 2004 series Too Posh to Washsaw TV duo Kim and Aggie recoil in mock horror as a plummy voiced young lady was revealed to have a layer of grime on the under-curve of her breasts - the result of never having changed her bra.

The term "the great unwashed" was first used to describe the poorer classes in the overcrowded, cholera-hit 1840s. Today, the insult "dirtbag" is, according to Wikipedia, a "general term for an uncouth person who lacks class" and "continually disregards others and humanity in general".

But Smith notes how the horrific use of "social hygiene" by Nazi eugenicists made post-war intellectuals who had happily drawn parallels between cleanliness and morality think twice before opening their mouths.

"Dirty" jibes now carry overtones of racism and some Australian chatrooms were quick to accuse John Coates of prejudice last week, even as his spokesman insisted that it was "a light-hearted remark".

Back in the BBC studio, puzzled presenter Hazel Irvine was wondering what this Beijing soap opera all meant. One thing is for sure: Coates wasn't accusing the British swimmers of not being "clean". In the doped-up bloodstreams of competitive sport, that would have been an entirely different kind of slander.

Clean: a history of personal hygiene and purityby Virginia Smith, published by Oxford University Press, is out now in paperback, price: €12.70