[brokenkebaby]

>Isn’t it widely recorded that handwashing only came to be a norm mid-1800s?

You're mixing up two completely different modes of washing. The one related to medicine in XIX is about washing hands in lime solution. Pop science magazines always miss this part to make it feel more sensational I guess.

Washing visibly dirty hands (e.g. with soil, grease, or blood), often using sand as an abrasive cleaner, and ashes to dissolve fat, or (depending on one's wealth) a real soap was a norm for a very long time before. [Edit: added the last para]

[adrian_b]

Actually exactly what was used for washing the hands and the body in the Ancient World is a bit of a mystery, I have never seen an adequate discussion of this.

In the Ancient World, at least from almost 4000 years ago, i.e. when the Epic of Gilgamesh was written, until less than 2000 years ago, by the time of Pliny the Elder, the main use of the vegetable oils, including of oils like sesame oil or olive oil, was not as food, but for body massage, preferably mixed with perfumes.

Starting with the Epic of Gilgamesh, but also in many later literary works, until in the early Roman Empire, the greatest pleasures for civilized people were described as eating bread, drinking beer or wine and being anointed with vegetable oil.

While it must have been pleasant to be smeared with oil, all good things come to an end. Greasy hands or greasy clothes are undesirable, so they must have had some means to wash the abundant oil from their bodies, at a time when they did not have soap.

The most likely method for removing the oil from the skin is that they have used lye made from plant ashes (i.e. potassium carbonate) or from mineral natron (sodium carbonate).

However, at least for a modern sensitive skin such harsh washing methods seem rather unpleasant, which seems inconsistent with the pleasure associated by the ancients with anointing.

[DonaldFisk]

> While it must have been pleasant to be smeared with oil, all good things come to an end. Greasy hands or greasy clothes are undesirable, so they must have had some means to wash the abundant oil from their bodies, at a time when they did not have soap.

They scraped it off: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strigil

[adrian_b]

That was certainly necessary for an athlete where a layer of dirt would stick on the oil, but just rubbing your body with any piece of metal or of wood is not enough to make it non-greasy.

Besides having no soap, there was no paper and any tissue was very expensive as it required a lot of work, so they would not use disposable tissues.

Only lye, which is made from water and plant ashes, would have been easily available, but that is much more unpleasant and damaging for the skin than soap.

[542354234235]

We already produce natural oils for our skin (sebum), and those oils accumulate skin cells, dirt and dust, sweat, etc. It was common for Romans to use bathhouses, where they would coat themselves with olive oil, sometimes with an abrasive like pumice or fine sand, then use a strigil to remove the oil, and everything that had accumulated on the skin, before soaking/rinsing in the bath. This is enough to get you "not greasy" and they likely had a different concept of what "clean skin" should feel like, given that before soap, your bodies natural oils would be fairly ever-present.

https://www.unrv.com/culture/strigil.php

https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/103SNR

https://maa.missouri.edu/education/museum-in-30-objects/stri...