this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
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This always bothered the hell out of me. Why do they look like they are elves from middle earth, except they are wearing somewhat ragged clothes?
Probably because they didn‘t wash their faces with hot water and soap all the time but instead took sweat baths and washed them with cold water to keep the protective layer. They also had better teeth than most of us these days by the way.
Are you high? No! It's because you aren't seeing actual medieval people on tv. You are seeing an actor portraying a medieval person for a TV show. And it is well known in show business that no one wants to watch a TV show about ugly people. Plagues, stds, and pests like fleas and lice swept through ancient cities. Everyone drank beer instead of water because the water was so polluted that without the disinfecting effects of alcohol, you would die if you drank it. It wasn't uncommon to suffer malnutrition in times of famine or war. But you think that everyone had beautiful, flawless skin...?
The thing is, they won't have perfect skin, but most people wouldn't be ugly or look completely unkept. Medieval peasants knew about hygiene as well. If you want to know what medieval peasants probably looked like, just watch a documentary about tiny villages deep inside eastern Europe or Russia. You can tell tha a lot of the people living there don't wear makeup or use a lot of skincare products, but they still look good and well kept. They look the way healthy and normal people look like.
I'm sure they had some grooming standards. But that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about how fictional representations of medieval peasants have perfect skin. And the very obvious reason for this is that they are fictional.
The problem is I genuinely don‘t know if you‘re being sarcastic or not because people throw around these exact false claims all the time but there are so many of them that I think you must be sarcastic?
No sodas or candies then.
Similarly bad teeth (with fewer options for treatment and management, like effective fillings), different reasons. Rot was rarer (though still widespread, as in the modern day, something like 50% vs. 90%) because peasants ate few sweet foods; abrasion was universal and often so severe that it led to tooth loss entirely - 'funny' enough, this abrasion also reduced the number of cavities which still occurred despite the low-sweets diet, since cavities were literally worn away.
It could be worse, they could forget about the ragged clothes as well. Wheel of Time did that, and every character looked like they walked straight out of a Nordstrom's.