[adrian_b]

Massage with vegetable oil, usually mixed with some fragrances, had been a widespread practice for many millennia, not only in Ancient Greece, but in most lands around the Mediterranean, which was about as frequent as it would be today to take a shower.

In fact, in the ancient world the main use for vegetable oils was for massage and for perfumes, and not as food.

In the ancient literary sources, there are very few, if any, mentions of vegetable oil used as food, but countless mentions of massage with oil.

Already in the first version of the Gilgamesh Epic, almost 4 millennia ago (the Old Babylonian version), there were 4 pleasures listed as the benefits of being a civilized man as opposed to a savage: making love with a professional woman, eating bread, drinking beer and being massaged with oil (these were used to lure Enkidu into going to a city).

While in later times olive oil was the main oil used for massage, in the Gilgamesh Epic it seems that the oil that was used was sesame oil.

2000 years after Gilgamesh, e.g. in Pliny the Elder, similar accounts were given, i.e. that the main benefit from grapes is drinking wine while the main benefit from olives is being massaged with olive oil, both for pleasure and for a healthy skin.

While massage with olive oil or other vegetable oils was ubiquitous and daily for those who could afford it, for me it is a bit of a mystery how they cleaned themselves after that, in the absence of soap, because I have never seen any mention about this.

[BugsJustFindMe]

> Massage with vegetable oil, usually mixed with some fragrances, had been a widespread practice for many millennia, not only in Ancient Greece

Fragrances made of what if not volatile chemicals? Did they disrupt the human oxidation field? Did the oil?

Anyway, drinking and bathing in mercury was also widespread practice for millenia from ancient greece to the 20th century. And now we know why so many people died prematurely from mercury poisoning.

Trepanation, bloodletting, smearing animal feces on the skin, all common practices of the ancient world practiced for thousands of years that we now know are generally bad ideas.

If one appeals to age-old widespread practice, that's fallacy. There needs to be more than "people did this for a long time" before we make claims about whether that thing is actually better than modern alternatives. People have a long history of doing stupid things for very long times until something new comes along.

[adrian_b]

According to TFA, the main culprit for disrupting "the human oxidation field" from the skin care products are the alcohols contained therein.

The massage oils and the perfumes used by the ancients were not alcohol-based, but they contained only vegetable oil and oily extracts from aromatic plants.

From what is described in TFA, the oils and perfumes used in the ancient world would have had a much weaker disruption effect than modern products, if any, because they would have captured less of the hydroxyl radicals, while also generating some radicals themselves, possibly offseting the effects due to the captured radicals.

The various undesirable ancient practices listed by you have existed, but they cannot be considered as widespread or recommended by medical authorities, when compared with massage with oil.

Massage with oil was something as frequent as washing for anyone who would not be considered as poor. Massage with oil was praised as important for a healthy skin by the ancient physicians, e.g. from the Hippocratic tradition, for whom the majority of their advices about hygiene, healthy nutrition and exercises remains as valid today as they were 2500 years ago.

[BugsJustFindMe]

> According to TFA, the main culprit for disrupting "the human oxidation field" from the skin care products are the alcohols contained therein.

Phenoxyethanol is a phenol ether, not an alcohol. Olive oil contains a collection of phenolic acids, which are considered to be more toxic than phenol ethers, not less. We intentionally replace the acid hydrogen with an alkyl group specifically to lower toxicity. We do this because we actually study things like toxicity now, which the ancient Greeks did not.

> but they contained only ... oily extracts from aromatic plants.

Phenoxyethanol is an oily substance also sometimes found in aromatic plants! Green tea and chicory both contain it! People across the planet have been consuming chicory and green tea for thousands of years! (Oh no!)

[tpm]

> how they cleaned themselves after that

Water (bath), wash cloth or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strigil

[adrian_b]

None of those looks effective by itself for not leaving greasy the hands and the rest of the skin.

For thorough washing of clothes and other objects they were using lye, but lye would be too harsh for skin.

Perhaps they were first using earth to absorb most of the oil, which was then removed with the strigil, followed by washing with water.

[tpm]

They could have been using some sort of soap too, we don't really know.