Also, why no hairy armpits in all the nude paintings?
(I asked my art history professor this and she said something about they were going for a more idealized form and so left off unflattering details but I wasn't fully satisfied with her answer)
A couple of older threads had some answers you might find interesting.
In the second thread for instance, one fellow mentions that a character in the Canterbury Tales is depicted as having acne.
I'll follow up on the comments in the thread linked to by /u/logoscyth and say that there may have simply been less acne.
We're just now learning about the ecology of the human body - the bacteria and fungus that live on our skin and in our gut. Evidence is accruing that these microbial communities, collectively known as the microbiome, play a much larger role in our lives than we had previously imagined. For example, in investigating the microbes that live on the faces of acne sufferers and clear-skinned people, researchers found that there was a marked difference between the types of bacteria: Same bug, different strain.
Here is an older but clearly written (and pretty fascinating) overview of the skin as habitat for microbes. It has a brief note about environmental conditions that affect microbial communities, to include a discussion of soap and cosmetics. A good way to think about this is that when you say "That soap irritates my skin" what is likely happening is that the soap changes the habitat of the microbiome and therefore changes the population that lives on your skin. This sounds kind of clinical, but imagine if a valley suddenly started getting flash floods every day or a river was dammed to form a lake. Plants and animals that used to live in those environments wouldn't be able to survive anymore. Your skin and the bugs that live on it behave the same way.
This is a lengthy explanation to say that sudden changes to your skin environment result in changes to the types of microbes that live on it. When you move to a different climate or change makeup or (in this example) switch cleaning routines you could end up with a microbiome that is less robust and more prone to irritation. Specifically with regards to this question, we can look at studies of hunter-gatherer tribes and western civilization. Acne is just about universal for western civilization, but nonexistent in tribal cultures
"In westernized societies, acne vulgaris is a nearly universal skin disease afflicting 79% to 95% of the adolescent population. ... Of 1200 Kitavan subjects examined (including 300 aged 15-25 years), no case of acne (grade 1 with multiple comedones or grades 2-4) was observed. Of 115 Aché subjects examined (including 15 aged 15-25 years) over 843 days, no case of active acne (grades 1-4) was observed." -- Cordain et. al, Acne vulgaris: a disease of Western civilization, Archives of Dermatology, 2002
If most of the people in historical eras lived a life closer to the island tribes of Papua New Guinea than they did to today's western civilization, then it seems reasonable to assume that there was less acne overall.
One interesting side note - we are just beginning to understand this ecology but one practical application of this new knowledge is the development of products that 'restore' the microbiome. This New York Times story describes one such product. In essence, we're identifying part of what is lost in modern rituals of beauty and cleanliness and replacing that element with a scientifically verified version.
As a tangential/follow-up question, do we have evidence of the frequency with which portraitists ignored blemishes? My question is largely inspired by Oliver Cromwell's famous "warts and all" request. I would have assumed it would have to be at least somewhat prevalent to prompt his comment in the first place, but I'm curious if there's any evidence of this cover-up.
Hi there people!
Welcome to this thread about a really interesting question. If you come here and ask: "Commiespaceinvader, what is going on? I see 41 comments in the comment counter but there seems to be much less here. What's the deal with that? I demand an explanation now!"
Well, hypothetical user, an explanation is what you will get: This is a sub aims to provide serious, academic-level answers to questions about history.
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