> > why would you favour naturally oily hands over clean hands?
> At the end of the day, with your accelerated oil producing hands, that became that way because you are constantly stripping them of it, your hands are much more goopy than mine.
my hands are certainly not "goopy", but if you associate soap with that, then you obviously haven't found the right soap for you.
> > you are sacrificing everybody's hygiene for your own comfort. what do you do around babies and the elderly?
> I don't even think about it. Despite your implication of calamity, nothing happens. (Besides, babies are a lot dirtier than me, drooling and sticking everything in their mouths)
this sounds like an uneducated statement to say the least. it's not about dirt (a bit of dirt never harmed anyone), it's about bacteria and diseases, and the risks posed to those with developing or weakened immune systems. could you sleep if a baby you had contact with died from MRSA or diarrhoea? if you are consciously assisting the spread of infection and disease then calamity is the least you deserve.
> > despite your superior body chemistry, do you not wash your clothes in soap?
> Clothes are another matter, they aren't living organisms with evolved mechanisms to survive in a natural environment full of all kinds of microorganisms that could kill you. You need to wash clothes just as you need to take care of any artificial tool.
if you admit to willfully using soap on items that protect and insulate an organism then these could by natural extension include skin. also, the reproductive and therefore evolutionary rates of microorganisms far exceed our own - you and your kin would not evolve quickly enough to survive a pandemic.
> Naturally, we don't need soap. This is a classic marketing technique, create a problem, “hygiene”, then push a solution, buy my soap. Only the soap creates more problems, but nevermind that. Oh if you're really suffering, buy my hand cream.
bacterial infection and disease are not a product of unethical marketing. nor are they some imagined, artificial problem. the suggestion that soap is not needed is conflating to the domain of cosmetics, of which it does not belong. I'm not saying soap is the answer to humanity's demise, it just enables us and other species to thrive. the major example being post-sanitation life expectancy.
> > would you refuse antiseptic treatment, or condone a team of surgeons with your unhygienic practice to save your life?
> Would you take blood pressure medication when you didn't need it? How about put a cast on your arm for a week after lifting a heavy object just in case the bones are slightly weakened? Just because medicine can cure a problem doesn't mean you should use it all the time.
firstly, soap is not a medicine so that analogy is safely dismissed. secondly, those are auto-negating or rhetorical questions, so I'm not inclined to answer. mine were life-or-death scenarios, which you chose not to answer. I wonder why that was. I will not assume you would choose death, but instead presume you acknowledge that you would indeed need soap.
also, since you touched on threat perception. it's not about what could happen, it's about what is happening and what is being done to prevent it.
> > there is a reason humans harness sanitation: it saves and prolongs lives
> An enormous oversimplification. Obviously it saves lives, but if we lived in a world where we never came in contact with any microorganism that might kill us, our defense systems would be weakened to a point where if we were ever exposed to one, we'd all die.
soap does not alter our immune systems. everything we are immune to has nothing to do with the availability of soap. it's more about protection and mitigation against the things we are incapable of becoming immune to.
it's absurd you dare include yourself in that "we". you are the minority here. you are alive for two reasons, the first being you are lucky enough to live in an environment where sanitation is available, and secondly because the majority of mankind grasp basic biological concepts and are not living under some anti-goopiness delusion.
there are several instances in pre-sanitation history where we did nearly all die. to say that you do not need soap is simply insane (etymological pun intended :)