In recent years, our bathrooms have been affected by a strange phenomenon: washcloths no longer hang next to the sinks. Most often, they are mummified in the back of a cupboard where they have every chance of falling into oblivion, apart from those rare moments when they are exhumed to place them, damp, on the forehead of a feverish child. . “When I provide my guests with a bath set, the washcloth always comes back dry”notes Anne, 51 years old. “My mother gave me her collection monogrammed with the family initials, but I don’t know what to do with it”, admits Sylvie, 60 years old. When he goes to his grandmother’s house, Lucas, 16, finds the object ” funny “ but did not really adopt it. We are now more likely to find a sponge in our shower cubicles to descale the tiled walls than a good old washcloth.
It must be said that this little cotton bag measuring fifteen by twenty centimeters, passed through everyone’s buttocks in the house, is not very attractive. “The worst are the dark colored models to hide the grimejudge Claire, 52, who admits to having been a child addicted to washcloths (four per shower session). The towel doesn’t have the same effect because you use it when you are clean. » Not to mention that it smells very musty. “The washcloth catches dead cells and bacteria that rot with humidity, which promotes bad odorsexplains Marie Jourdan, dermatologist. When I still washed myself this way, I found a little trick. When cleaning the glove, I passed the water through the inside and not the outside so that it would remove all that little broth. »
The disgust aroused by the thing undoubtedly explains the lack of interest shown by historians. While we find specialists knowledgeable in almost all cleanliness utensils – the towel, the bidet, the shower, etc. –, not a single one was interested in the washcloth (even AI today has difficulty generating images of washcloths). In The Clean and the Dirty. Body hygiene since the Middle Ages (Seuil, 1985), which recounts the slow refinement of hygiene, the historian Georges Vigarello does not mention it. Throughout the pages, we still guess that the washcloth finds its origin in the square of white linen with which the 17th century courtiere century rubbed his face, except that it was not intended to get wet. Following the plague epidemic, water was blamed for all ills (visual problems, catarrhs, paleness and weakening of the face, etc.), which explains why the ancestor of the washcloth was scrubbed dry.
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