Eugenics and preventive medicine … the suburbs … suburban children … naturists and nudity … post-1945 hard-sell … flower power and multiculturalism … modern well-being … epilogue … future trends

In this last chapter we face, to some extent, a final reckoning – and we can barely do justice to it in the space that remains. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries are by far the best-documented and probably the most grimly fascinating of all the centuries embraced by the history of personal cleansing. They are probably also the most interesting period for us as individuals, as well as recalling many of our parents (and grandparents) own personal experiences. The sense of déjà vu is enormous. We can see older habits and customs persisting in domestic housing, cosmetic care, health education, therapeutics and general self-care – but the scale is utterly different. It is global, again. The tried and tested hygienic ‘middle-class’ life-style of the western industrial urban classes for the first time became feasible for a much larger proportion of the world population, beneficiaries of scientific medicine and a booming global economy. The economic equation between personal cleansing and domestic income is inescapable in these last centuries, as it was in every other era; but behaviouralism also still plays a vital part in our responses. Purificatory ideologies also went global – anti-pollution ecology became an international crusade, pollution fears have brought major world food industries to their knees and, tragically, purity-rules have also inspired mass ‘ethnic cleansing’

The twentieth century itself was probably the most hygienic and cleansing-conscious era on record in all industrialised countries. It was punctuated by two world wars, both leading to periods of significant social transition. The whole period 1945-2006 has often been portrayed as one of extreme materialism and fully secularised personal hygiene – a new form of highly individualistic narcissism. But this may just be a trick of the light – many more people obviously embraced by economic consumerism, whilst the health objectives remained the same. The period 1900-1939 was also individualistic and narcissistic, and saw a huge rise in health consumerism and the ideology of the fit and beautiful body. Personal hygiene had now reached the stage of a general consensus.