Wow. All the maintenance. I would hate to have to spend so much time on it - boring and tedious (and I'm not a morning person). I realize certain jobs require it. Fortunately I teach college, so as long as I can throw the hair into a low ponytail and manage to wear a skirt to my lecture classes, I'm OK. Weirdly enough, if I wash my hair at night, wring the water out as best I can, wrap it in a long beach towel for the next 15 minutes or so, then let the rest of it dry while I sleep with a towel on my pillow, then it comes out soft and even a little bit fluffy/wavy, even though it's normally straight. Ice cold water? I couldn't stand to dip my head in that. I think I would be traumatized for the rest of the day, and probably have a headache as well. By the way, for the biochemistry students among you, sodium lauryl sulfate (a strong detergent) is the same thing as "SDS" that you run gels with. (hmmm... in other words, it keeps proteins denatured... is that part of why it hurts your hair? or can it get into the collagen?)
Mornings - bad hair if I switch to nights. Mornings and nights if I have some daytime activity that causes me to sweat during the day. What I have a hard time picturing is that 500 years ago, people went months without bathing. And it wasn't like they had some cushy air-conditioned job or house to hang out in. Man, that must have been bad. Even worse is that there are stories where they would reuse the water that someone else had bathed in.
They used to think it was unhealthy to take baths, and that you should only do it twice in your life: "at the birthing and at the burial". I can only imagine how everyone must have smelled. Also, speaking of not washing, when Queen Elizabeth I died she had more than 1/4 inch of makeup caked onto her face.
I think she was the one that said she took a bath once a month whether she needed to or not. Sounds like at the end she might have broken her rule a few times or she didn't include the face. Those had to be some pretty bad times. I don't know how creation continued.
