Buddy of mine did research in Milan on common sunscreen ingredients. In a lab, those chemicals didn't tend to cross the dermis.

But put that person in the sun and you find detectable quantities of those chemicals in serum within minutes. Turns out the flushing (i.e. rushing of blood to the skin, in particular, to the surface of the dermis) increases permeability. Nobody really tested those chemicals for intravenous use.

So in a very real sense, you ingest in all but digestion the ingredients in your lotions.

some of us live in hot climates where a cold shower genuinely feels amazing and cools the body down.

some of us enjoy showering daily, because the bed sheets get less dirty that way, which means less laundry to do, and reduces my stress.

some of us are married to a lady and want a happy home life (lol).

a sample size of 1 (you) does not mean it’s true for everyone. Just saying. :)

I'm wondering if you have its informed consent.

It turns out a few of the customers douse their dollars with their personal scents to remind everyone who's spending money with them, and I suppose to see where it might be circulating.

Reducing this to the naturalistic fallacy is inappropriate.

Notice the commenter said "most likely". He's using a heuristic. When we are working with incomplete knowledge (e.g. lack of studies on phenoxyethanol), naturalism is a useful probabilistic heuristic because we are /generally/ adapted to what was in our ancestral environment. It's also a useful heuristic to defer to things we have a significant amount of understanding of (olive oil) than things we have little understanding of (a concoction invented in the 2010s).

When we say "natural", by the way, we are approximately referring to what humans adapted to by natural selection. Eating large amounts of cyanide isn't "natural" just because it's in nature; that's semantic confusion.

No one objects to saying a zoo animal should be eating its "natural" diet, and that its enclosure should represent its "natural" habitat, because this is a generally true useful heuristic. Maybe the apes are going to be healthier if you put them in a VR headset with Half-Life: Alyx and feed them protein shakes -- where's the research? -- but I'm not going to put that on equal footing until the research is out. Until then, I'll go with naturalism.

There are artificial things that are very good for us, such as vaccines. But we know this because we have sufficient research. When we don't have sufficient research, heuristics like naturalism are going to give you better results on average.

>The pantheon of capricious gods living on mount olympus? Harvesting the sweat of wrestlers to use as treatment for genital warts?

He said they got "some" things right. It's implied that they got a lot of other things wrong.

In fact, in the ancient world the main use for vegetable oils was for massage and for perfumes, and not as food.

In the ancient literary sources, there are very few, if any, mentions of vegetable oil used as food, but countless mentions of massage with oil.

Already in the first version of the Gilgamesh Epic, almost 4 millennia ago (the Old Babylonian version), there were 4 pleasures listed as the benefits of being a civilized man as opposed to a savage: making love with a professional woman, eating bread, drinking beer and being massaged with oil (these were used to lure Enkidu into going to a city).

While in later times olive oil was the main oil used for massage, in the Gilgamesh Epic it seems that the oil that was used was sesame oil.

2000 years after Gilgamesh, e.g. in Pliny the Elder, similar accounts were given, i.e. that the main benefit from grapes is drinking wine while the main benefit from olives is being massaged with olive oil, both for pleasure and for a healthy skin.

While massage with olive oil or other vegetable oils was ubiquitous and daily for those who could afford it, for me it is a bit of a mystery how they cleaned themselves after that, in the absence of soap, because I have never seen any mention about this.