Personal hygiene | Sex on our skin

The small, promiscuous animal likes to go to unusual places: the hair follicle mite. Photo: imago/Kalcutta Hardly anyone talks about it, but: Among the everyday tasks that are unavoidable, washing your own body is by far one of the most dull. Keep running water over your skin, handling soap, scrubbing, rubbing, rinsing. Morning after morning, evening after evening. It's a thoroughly annoying affair. Washing is time-consuming and, above all, boring due to the repetitive actions that you are forced to carry out every day: hair, face, upper body, under the armpits, stomach, legs, buttocks. It's so boring. Please don't forget the spaces between the toes, the perianal region and the intergluteal fold, where a lot of things accumulate over the course of a strenuous or eventful day.

You're so tired of the same circling hand movements, this idiotic drudgery on your own body. If only it were the sweat and the sebum. But you're dealing with a lot more material that needs to be removed: all the dead skin flakes (which continue to die relentlessly every minute), the oily cosmetic residue, the dust, a thick film of city dirt and grease. Not to forget: all the fatty acids that cause unpleasant smells. Officially, these acids are called “microbial metabolites” in a derogatory way. That sounds pretty scientific and neutral, but in reality they are the feces of the bacteria living on our skin. Yes, you'd be amazed - that's not something people like to talk about in TV advertising and on "Lanz" and "Maischberger".

Only the brave Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk takes up the taboo topic of hair follicle mites ("they live on us, with us, from us... these little mites have sex on our skin") and thankfully speaks plainly in a scientific article. The hair follicle mite, we learn, is extremely keen on melatonin, "a substance that makes small invertebrates become active at night," but which the horny little crawly cannot produce itself.

But as usual, nature has organized everything perfectly: At night, when people sleep, they release generous amounts of melatonin, the coke produced by mites, through their skin. A perfect natural symbiosis of givers and takers has been created in which, if you look closely, the ultimate meaning and purpose of our facial hair is revealed: "With this melatonin 'feeding' we enable the little animals to have their nocturnal sex life. (…) The males have a penis that protrudes upwards from the front of the body, which means that the male has to position himself under the female during nighttime trysts and both cling to human hair while they copulate."

Thomas Blum fundamentally disagrees with the prevailing so-called reality. He won't be able to change her for the time being, but he can reprimand her, admonish her or, if necessary, give her a beating. So that the bad retreats. We stand in solidarity with his fight against reality. Therefore, from now on, “The Good Column” will appear here on Mondays. Only the best quality for the best readers! The collected texts can be found at: dasnd.de/diegute

For a long time, the myth spread that these sex-obsessed parasites had no anus, that they accumulated their feces in their bodies for weeks and then scattered them explosively on our skin at the moment of their death. However, modern research has now refuted this: "The mites have a functioning excretory opening and continuously release tiny amounts of feces," as it says on a mite specialist website. That's reassuring.

Sure, after so many years you have a routine for personal hygiene and showering, and you no longer have to think about the sequence of tasks: Should you wash your beard hair and eyelashes first in the morning in order to get rid of the residues of nighttime mite sex that are stuck to the surface of your skin? Does it make more sense to start by washing your hair to allow the expensive medical shampoo to take effect for a while? Or should you first take care of the hollows between the scrotum and the inner thighs so that it no longer “smells like a stock cube” (Martin Puntigam)?

Some of you may still remember that in the past - up until the 80s and 90s - many families who were not wealthy had a so-called bathing day. When I was still a child growing up in the darkest province, the family bathed on Saturdays: in the morning the bathing stove was heated so that there was hot water for several hours, then each family member took a bath one by one. On weekdays people resort to what is commonly referred to as “cat washing”. In times when energy costs are constantly rising and the regions in which clean water is available are constantly shrinking, the less privileged will probably have to return to these or similar types of body cleansing sooner or later. Moderate body cleansing is also gentle on the skin: fewer allergies, less dry skin, intact skin flora (mite sex). And you save a lot of time that was previously wasted on an extremely boring activity.

Nevertheless, I am not sure whether, for the sake of a better future, something decisive could not be achieved through a successful world revolution and the inevitably subsequent advances in scientific research. Then at some point it would be ensured that all people, without exception, have access to electricity and sufficient clean water.

In any case, one thing is certain: the effort of cleaning your body would then be taken over by the fully automatic bathroom installed in every household without exception, in which, as soon as you trudge in, groggy in the morning, trained robot hands will carry out every necessary step in no time, from soaping to drying.

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