Archive for January, 2010

History of cleanliness in America

Thursday, January 7th, 2010

I’ve just started reading The Early History of Cleanliness in America, a paper by Richard L Bushman and Claudia L Bushman. I’m just on the second page and this graph has stopped me dead in my tracks:

In the summer of 1789 Henry Drinker, a well-to-do Quaker merchant, installed a shower box for his family in the backyard of his Philadelphia town house. A year later on July 1, his wife Elizabeth, then sixty-five years old, went in for the first time. “I bore it better than I expected,” she wrote in her diary, “not having been wett all over att once, for 28 years past.”

Uh, this should make for interesting reading.

Blending thoughts

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

A little blending

I did some perfume blending tonight. I used the ylang ylang mentioned below along with cedarwood and rose absolute.

During the commute to work this morning, I went through my notes from the perfume course I took. One thing that my teacher said sticks in my mind:

“Beware of people who complementcompliment you too much. They want something.”