Human beings are a rather fickle species. It’s pretty interesting when you consider just how much we delude ourselves. Take soap. Okay. We all use it. We all take showers or baths. In this modern era you can’t be sat next to on public transportation, able to hold a job or much else without daily washings. But if you think about it, when we get out of the shower we’re really not all that much cleaner than when we got in.
Why, you ask? Well because the bar of soap we are rubbing all over our bodies goes from the rather regularly cleaned portions of our body (hands, face, arms) and reaches way back into the netherworlds of all of our “dirty spots.” All our sweaty, underexposed, over-contaminated places. It’s not even a question; it’s a matter of fact.
Unless you’re like my wife who has a separate pump-action face-soap in a dispenser that is totally separate from the soap you use for the rest of your body, your face is about as clean as your buttocks.
It’s just ridiculous; in a way; to ever think of the human body as “clean.” I mean think about where we come from; bloody, wailing, mucus-laden newborns. Think about what we end up as; tired, feeble, meek, incontinent elderly.
Even when you’re talking about an elderly person who is mildly coherent and able to feed and dress themselves; they are not clean. How can they be? Think of all the crevices and cracks of our homes that we try and get after; now imagine reaching those heights as an elderly. The best you could hope for maybe is when you live in an assisted living facility and you have someone who cleans up after you. Even that’s kind of depressing.
There is a pretty interesting article entitled The Dangers of Soap and this piece kind of gets at what I’m going for. The author of the piece talks about commercial brand soaps containing “Sodium Laurel Sulfate (SLS)…(and)…Sodium Laureth Sulfate (SLFS).”
SLS says the author “…is highly toxic…causes eye damage…(that) irritates the skin by inflaming it.”
The piece goes on to say that “most soap brands on the market also contain animal fat…called tallow.”
The writer argues that the “commercial brand soaps along with the chemical-laced water we use to shower and bath with robs our skin of natural body moisture.” Moreover the synthetically derived fragrances are harmful as they “deaden our natural sense of olfaction.” All these chemicals combined flow right into our bloodstream.
The writer argues for glycerin based soaps as he says glycerin is derived from natural sources.
The fact though that virtually every man, woman, and child in the developed world uses soaps which have all manner of fats and chemicals and an over rather unnatural derivation only further reinforces my point that we are never really clean.
Anyway the issue of cleanliness is usually on my mind; I try to keep up after the house, trim my nails, scrub my teeth, navigate all the contours of my shape in the shower. But try though we might; we are never really clean.
Think about it; human beings are this wild species who has tamed all other species, has figured how to weather the natural elements, and has built up this massive empire which stretches to virtually every corner of land on this planet, into the oceans, and even high into outer space and our cleanliness is only ‘relative.’
The next time you bring that bar of soap to your face, neck, forearms, or tummy; consider the question:
“Do you know where that bar of soap has been?”
Gross.
Source:
http://dherbs.com/articles/dangers-of-soap-375.html