this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
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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?