Timeline for Natural and affordable way to dye hair in medieval period?
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12 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Apr 15, 2021 at 11:02 | comment | added | Chris H | @Graham I've read a little bit about this, but can't find the best references. [This article](hhttps://www.worldhistory.org/Medieval_Hygiene/) however sums things up fairly well - getting clean was hard, but people weren't filthy either. However people in crowded places did have to put up with some nasty smells; even if the luckier humans had latrines, the ubiquitous beasts of burden didn't. | |
| Apr 15, 2021 at 9:34 | comment | added | user84912 | @Graham I mean dude even neanderthals and other cavemen disinfected their teeth with sulfur and salt or sometimes by chewing charcoal or special roots. Even dogs chew hard inedible and sometimes toxic things to clean their teeth.. I doubt medieval people were so dumb to pull their teeth or let them rot.... A rotting teeth can kill you quickly.... Really quickly. And there's proof that even Romans, Egyptians and vikings had toothpaste. There's a thing called natural selection.... People with clean teeth would surpass people with rotting teeth. | |
| Apr 15, 2021 at 7:52 | comment | added | AI0867 | The very low life expectancies in those times are frequently misinterpreted. It's an average over everyone who is born, and there were a lot of crib and childhood deaths in those days. If you made it to adulthood you had a fair chance of making it to 60. Source: academic.oup.com/ije/article/34/6/1435/707557 | |
| Apr 15, 2021 at 1:22 | comment | added | Graham | @Thera As for teeth, you really need to look into more domestic history. Everyone's teeth rotted and were extracted, and no-one did anything to stop it. Rich families often gave their children a coming-of-age gift of having all their teeth pulled out and a false set made, so that they wouldn't have to deal with tooth decay later. Les Miserables famously features one character having her teeth extracted to get a little.money, where those teeth would go into some rich girl's dentures. | |
| Apr 15, 2021 at 1:17 | comment | added | Graham | @Thera They certainly did not. Average life expectancy was 30-40 for men, and adult women had double the chance of dying as men due to childbirth complications. Some people reached 60, sure, the same as some people today reach 100 despite drinking and smoking. They were outliers. And the ones reaching 60 back then were more likely to be the rich, who would bathe as part of an upper-class lifestyle, not for reasons of basic hygiene. | |
| Apr 14, 2021 at 22:26 | comment | added | user84912 | @Graham well you don't need to know what an infection is for it to kill you, good luck surviving 1 year without brushing your teeth. Since medieval people lived over 60 years, I suspect they did wash frequently. Simple natural selection, animals with bad self care go extinct. Even rats and raccoons wash themselves and wash their food, and they have no idea what infections or bacteria are. | |
| Apr 14, 2021 at 21:23 | comment | added | Graham | @Thera No, this is simply the truth, and was completely normal. Rich people literally carried scented sponges to put their nose in when they were around other people. They had no concept of "infection" for anything but pandemic diseases, nor that it was linked to hygiene. For the ultimate example of that, remember that surgeons would only wash their hands after surgery; no-one saw the point in washing before. | |
| Apr 14, 2021 at 11:50 | comment | added | AlexP | @L.Dutch-ReinstateMonica: Citation needed. Yes, it is a common trope in bad movies. No, it was not real. In the Middle Ages they did their best to keep as clean as they could, and they even spent considerable sums in building communal bathing infrastructure. | |
| Apr 14, 2021 at 11:33 | comment | added | user84912 | @L.Dutch-ReinstateMonica I suppose and hope it was only a niche minority culture or maybe an exaggeration. A skin infection as well as a scalp, eye or teeth infection can easily be lethal. | |
| Apr 14, 2021 at 11:19 | comment | added | L.Dutch♦ | @Thera, in medieval time it was considered unhealthy to bathe or change clothes too often. Michelangelo abode so well to that custom that when he was taken off from his boots, a thick layer of dead skin came away with them. | |
| Apr 14, 2021 at 10:38 | comment | added | user84912 | In medieval times you could be outcasted or even killed for looking dirty or smelling bad..... Because it was believed that smelly and dirty people brought diseases, illness and plagues. | |
| Apr 14, 2021 at 10:13 | history | answered | Radovan Garabík | CC BY-SA 4.0 |