Smelly people first thing in the morning making me cross

[Wherecanitbe]

I completely understand in the UK we are currently experiencing extremely high temperatures, however......

why is it so many people smell really strongly of B.O first thing in the morning? I was on the bus Saturday morning around 9am and their were one or two people who smelled really strongly, not just slightly. This morning I was in my local shop around 10am and the man in front of me smelled that strongly that when he left, the smell even lingered.

I can understand if it was towards the end of the day, then it would be more reasonable that people would have B.O. I am just really irritated how these people think it's acceptable that other people have to put up with their offensive smell.

Oh for fuck sake, enough of the #bekind.

Nobody is marauding around the underground shouting ‘you stink!’ at vulnerable people, I’m quite sure. The vast majority of us just grit our teeth and bear it. But we can have a whinge about it, surely?

It’s not just B.O., either. A typical week of commuting on the tube involves smelling other people's unwashed clothes, greasy hair, bad breath, alcoholic breath and stale fag smoke. It’s nauseating and antisocial. They can’t all have some big back story about why it’s not their fault they smell. Some of them must just be grubby bastards.

I was always in the shower bath everyday twice if I got really hot. Then I hurt my back. I got stuck in the bath for two hours it was horrible. I cant stand up in the shower, I need to get a chair or stool but off work so no money. I hate it. I feel so miserable and grubby.i wash but it just isnt the same😥

I’m a menopausal bitch and shower everyday and dowse myself in deodorant/antiperspirant and within an hour I can guarantee I start smelling of BO.
Go figure🙄

Someone absolutely stank of shit when I was on way back home earlier. I sat on the back seat and pressed pine air freshener to my face while scrolling on my phone. I don't give feck how I looked. Fortunately this was early before the schools came out. Facing sweating school girls and shit smell is stuff of stress for me at moment.
Gonna work from home tomorrow. Just can't face third day in row.

Perhaps this person had a stoma.

That is a possibility, but why are these smells only in summer?
Plus when supervising an installation at a jobsite a couple of years back, I had two long bus journeys there and got a lift back at end of day. Travelling from one end of first bus route to it's end, a part of London travelling through stank of shit all the time. Thought it was bad drains and I only had to put up for a few weeks. Another employee from local office later told me it wasn't the drains when I mentioned it to them, but some of the locals! 😳 This has been going on for decades and why he bikes to work now. I said surely not. But followed his suggestion to observe when it hits you when someone gets on. It was true!
Thankfully it was as I said temporarily. My different part of London is normally pretty oderless except in Summer. Very occasionally the local sewage works pongs a bit. Since people pick up after their dogs now, it's rare to say someones stepped in something. Not trod in dog poo since a cottage holiday in 2014.

Why would you do that when you can just shower in the morning? I do wear deodorant but not at night, that seems strange to me.

Agreed. I mean if I needed to have a shower before bed I would but I'd never think of putting deodorant on?!

MIL justified only changing the sheets every couple of months because her dc were bathed at bedtime and she and FIL strip washed at bed time to save morning time. Personally I think she was just grubby and domestically lazy.

I was once trapped on a work training course when I had to sit next to a woman who wore a perfume which gave me migraine.
I agree that some people are lazy about personal hygiene and some will have conditions that make it very hard to keep fresh-smelling.
If we were living in 1926 we wouldn't have showers, we'd have good washes and a weekly bath, most likely.
There was a thread about migraines recently and perfumes were given as a trigger, which they can be, along with certain bathroom cleaners et cetera.
What I would say to all of you who are upset by 'smelly people' remember that a person doused in deodorant or perfume can be an unbearably 'smelly person' to someone else and keep your fresheners/sprayable stuff to yourselves and please don't spray them around your work stations, where someone sits on a seat near you. I speak from experience. I suspect a roll-on type of deodorant/antiperspirant wouldn't affect someone else. I think there's something about sprays.
I like someone who used to wear the most awful body spray and I spent a nightmare journey with her once, trying to breath through my mouth the whole way and never let my nose inhale it. Late in my life I've realised that stuffing something up my nose stops the migraine-triggers from getting up my nose and, I think, the olfactory nerve, but stuffing paper hankie or cotton wool up the nose is unsightly and maybe a bit dangerous.

I completely agree about perfume. Some people have clearly never heard that less is more and use it to mark their territory like foxes (nobody wants to smell that you were in the office kitchen a while ago, after you've left 🤢).

I’d never heard of flannel or strip washes before MN. Very odd and dirty.

It's what people used to do before showers were in houses - it's not odd or dirty.

Grew up in 80 before we had shower it was a bath once a week - so you strip wash every day so you didn't smell then we had shower but even in 90s parents used to worry about heating costs so limited them - not great when I had a waitress job in summer so I washed from the sink thoughly as options were not washing or strip washing.

My Dmum recently had injury that made showering hard - balance and had to keep arm dry so had to strip wash.

Apparently in past linen was very good for keeping people clean without washing as much as we do today - now I think some modern fabric hold onto smells and encourage sweating.

Better hope you never become disabled then.

I do a flannel wash in the morning. I leave so early that I would wake everyone else up if I showered, but I have to be clean!

Oh you missed a treat growing up then.

Sometimes the ‘sink wash’ as we called it would even be at the kitchen sink when we were small. Shared the same flannel for the whole family it’s just got dried out in between. 😁

Just looked it up in UK showers didn't become standard household fixture till 1980s which is when my parents had one installed above the bath.

Other countries were earlier something to do with UK plumbing issues meaning it was later here to install them than US or many European countries.

We moved into a new build house in 1993 and the shower was such a novelty. It still wasn't used much, partly I think because we had a hot water tank so there wasn't a never ending supply of hot water. It was only when I got to my teen years that I started showering every day. My parents didn't and still don't, as washing with a face cloth in the sink is normal to them.

Nope. Lots of people did this in the 70s and didn't smell. My dad did it and he was never a smelly person at all. Its what people did. Less of the judgement Mrs!

Didn't everyone smell of cigarettes in the 70s?

As an aside, if people are genuinely smellier now I wonder whether stress, dietary changes and health conditions are a cause.

It makes me wonder how people must have smelled up until antiperspirant. Did they notice?

You do realise that until the 50s/60s many many families, possibly most families, did not have bathrooms and many had an outside lavatory.

I agree with other posters about showers. I was born in 1960 and showers were not commonplace at all. Over the bath if you were very lucky.

I’m 54 so pretty ancient myself but hand on heart hadn’t ever heard of this type of bathing before. My Mum grew up dirt poor with no electricity or running water in the 40s but as kids she and her sister had a tub filled and had a bath every night. I’m in Australia so it’s probably just a cultural difference. I also wasn’t aware that in the 80s people may not have had a bathroom so that’s also surprising news considering how much older a country the UK is to us.

Most people had bathrooms in the 80’s. Showers were uncommon though. We had those rubber hoses that you attached to the taps, that would pop off randomly and you get sprayed with freezing/boiling water.

presumably in Australia with no electricity/running water it would be easier and inexpensive for a bath. Here it would take hours to heat the water for a bath, and there’s no way you could bath without hot water.

i remember my mum ferrying bowls of hot water for our baths. By the time shams heated the next lot the bath was freezing again. So you got a bowl of warm water and washed yourself with a flannel instead. More comfortable and less expensive.

Australia being a generally warmer climate unheated baths may have been an option?

We had the rubber attachments until 1983. When we got our first electric shower it was such a novelty and it was drummed into us kids to treat it properly so it didn’t get broken