The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
How hygiene became a dirty business
It’s a tricky question to ask in a pandemic – but does soap do us more harm than good? By Susannah Goldsbrough
ICLEAN by James Hamblin 288pp, Bodley Head, £16.99, ebook £9.99
n 2014, a group of researchers swabbed the faces of 400 volunteers in North Carolina and discovered microscopic mites called Demodex living on their skin. These eightlegged creatures are just a scratch on the surface – it turns out there are more microbial cells on and in each of us than human cells.
James Hamblin’s strange, good-humoured and persuasive book sets out to dispel the comfortable notion that our skin is a smooth protective barrier between us and the outside world. A decade’s worth of research, including the North Carolina study, has forced scientists to reimagine skin as a dynamic interface with our environment. It is this recognition that underpins Hamblin’s essential argument: that the way contemporary society thinks about hygiene is all wrong.
Our understanding of the role played by the microbes that live on the uppermost layer of our skin is limited, but we can be confident they are there for a reason. If the microbes that fill our guts are there to prevent disease, it’s logical that those on our skin might have a similar function. So why are we perpetually trying to wash them off ? Don’t ask Hamblin – as he declares in the opening sentence, he hasn’t showered for five years.
Of course, it’s unfortunate that a book arguing for doing less in the cleanliness department is being published in the middle of a global pandemic. But Hamblin’s case does not conflict with coronavirus guidelines – handwashing with soap is advocated throughout – and as we begin to think about what we want the world to look like in the wake of a disastrous breakdown of the relationship between humans and their environment, it actually makes for timely reading.
Instrumental, in Hamblin’s view, to messing up that relationship is the enormously powerful soap industry. After a slow start in the personal hygiene department – Christianity stands alone among other major world faiths for its lack of hygiene requirements; in the 920s, a Muslim envoy travelling along the Volga River described the Vikings he saw there as “the filthiest of Allah’s creatures” – it was the connection made by a physician in London between an 1854 cholera outbreak and a well that planted the idea that dirt could spread disease through water as well as air. The “hygiene revolution” gradually took hold in Europe and the United States.
The story of soap reads like an episode of Mad Men. A handful of entrepreneurs including the Lancashire Lever brothers (now Unilever) and William Procter and James Gamble harnessed the power of advertising to transform soap from a luxury to a necessity in the public consciousness. They produced the first sponsored content using the latest form of media: enter the soap opera.
Hamblin sees a continuum in the modern beauty industry: in 2014, a former Teen Vogue intern launched four products for a fan base built around her skin and beauty blog. The brand was Glossier, which is now valued at more than a billion dollars, but the technique was Procter & Gamble’s: build consumer trust by dominating the latest form of media.
Hamblin makes a compelling case that the skincare industry that has developed from those first soap entrepreneurs is making a killing selling us products we don’t need. It began with the Lever Brothers’ invention of Dove in 1957, marketed with the slogan “Looks like a soap, it’s used like a soap – but it is not a soap”. Dove is a soap but not a pure one – it contains a moisturiser. Soap works by removing oils from the skin; moisturisers replace them. In other words, Dove is closer to nothing than real soap and that is its appeal. To this day, the popularity of products marketed as “natural” or “bare” shows the genius of an industry that has trained its consumers to pay extra for the sensation that they are acquiring nothing at all.
Another troubling point that Hamblin raises about the beauty industry is its lack of regulation: in the US, most skincare products are classified as cosmetics, not drugs, so manufacturers do not need to prove them either safe or effective before putting them on the market. Any claim made about a miracle cream’s effects is as flimsy as a soap bubble.
Hamblin clearly had fun researching the book and it is thronged with intriguing personalities, from a Californian eco-warrior and soap empire heir who drives a foam bath to the Burning Man festival, to a chemical engineer who sells bottles of spray-on bacteria. Perhaps a little too much fun: his argument would benefit from a tighter focus. But Clean made me chuckle and then left me thoughtful, which isn’t bad for a book about soap.
If the microbes in our guts prevent disease, the same may be true of those on our skin
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Shortly after the outbreak of the Anglo-Boer War in 1899, three famous British writers –
Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle and Mary Kingsley – travelled independently to South Africa to do their bit. With different motivations, the trio had two things in common: a “restlessness expressed in a love of travel”, and the need to put a personal crisis behind them.
The aim of Sarah LeFanu’s book is twofold: to shine a light on this seismic moment in British imperial history, and to show how the war impacted on the lives, reputations and literary legacies of these three talented writers. It is both a biography and a work of literary criticism, and Sarah LeFanu has tried to solve the conundrum of theme versus chronology by dealing with each of her three subjects in turn: before, during and after the war. Inevitably this leads to some repetition and, at times, a lack of narrative thread. Yet it also allows the author to give each of
her writers a proper introduction. Born in India, Rudyard Kipling was emotionally scarred by the misery of the six childhood years he spent in England in the care of strangers – the so-called “House of Desolation” – when he was “exiled from home and parental love”. It would cause him, as a writer, to linger on the “themes of belonging and unbelonging, the pleasures of the one and the pain of the other”.
Mary Kingsley – the least well known of the three today – also grew up “lonely and neglected”. Books fed her passion for knowledge, and her father’s career as a personal physician to various globetrotting aristocrats fuelled her interest in travel. When both her parents died in 1892, she had the freedom and finance to head for West Africa, her two long trips resulting in the well-received books Travels in West Africa and West African Studies. In the former – “packed with sights and sounds and smells”, and “escapades both hair-raising and hilarious” – she “challenged the idea that Western civilisation was a universal good or goal”. In her view, making Africans “semi-civilised” was in fact pushing them into “a state of disintegrating culture”.
Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, was the son of a hard-up alcoholic. Arthur, as a result, was kept at boarding school during the holidays – his fees paid by relatives – and quickly took on the role of paterfamilias after his father was institutionalised. He trained as a doctor at Edinburgh University, but only practised for a few years. He preferred travel and writing, and got his break in 1884 when a story was published in the Cornhill magazine. This was followed, in 1887, by the first Sherlock (originally Sherrinford) Holmes tale, A Study in Scarlet.
By 1900, a few months into the Anglo-Boer War – the conflict between Britain and the two small Boer republics of Transvaal and Orange Free State in South Africa – all three authors were household names, but unfulfilled and restless. All three were suffering personal
crises: Kipling had recently lost his adored eldest child Josephine to pneumonia; Kingsley had been spurned by a handsome Jewish diplomat; and Conan Doyle was in love with a younger woman but refused to leave his chronically ill wife. “No wonder,” writes LeFanu, “the prospect of adventure on a distant battlefield held such strong appeal”. Kipling went as “propagandist-at-large and general morale-booster for the imperial troops”. Kingsley and Conan Doyle volunteered as nurse and physician respectively. Kingsley tended typhoid-stricken Boer prisoners-of-war until she herself was struck down. Conan Doyle witnessed countless British soldiers dying of disease, their corpses “wrapped in brown army blankets for want of enough regimental flags to go around”. All three were, writes LeFanu, outsiders and “putting on the English”, hence the title of the book – adapted from Kipling’s autobiography Something of Myself
– that implies a “reserve, a holding back, a refusal to reveal everything”. After her death, Kingsley’s campaign for Africans’ rights was taken up by anti-establishment figures like John Holt, E D Morel and Roger Casement. Conan Doyle wrote a bestselling history of the war, campaigned for Army reform and supported the generous peace treaty with the Boers.
But Kipling saw the treaty as a betrayal of the 20,000 Britons and colonials who had lost their lives. He became disillusioned by the “smug complacency of the British upper classes” and their belief that their rule “was god-given and uncontestable”. LeFanu has written a highly original, thoughtprovoking and insightful study of three great writers at a moment of imperial crisis. If the narrative is sometimes a little staccato and uneven, that is the price we have to pay for such a sensitive, multilayered book.
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