this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
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Illustrations of history
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Damn, did the Romans have sunscreen? Those guys in nothin' but undees must be getting burned like roasted peppers!
They may not exactly have been unionized workers. Or paid. Or voluntary. Or free.
The wealthy and athletes sometimes used olive oil for that purpose, but I have a few doubts about the likelihood of these poor working sods having any such luxury!
Maybe if they got the stuff with the carthage label, heard they were so infamous for low quality product that they began labelling it as coming from Cyrenaica because of how much Greek stuff went for.
I just realized...the wealthy and athletes thought the solution to being sun baked was to deep fry themselves in olive oil instead‽
Olive oil has a SPF of about 8, which means it, surprisingly, is not totally useless. They would have to scrape it off with a tool (or have a slave or assistant scrape it off) after they were finished with their outdoors activities, though.
Sounds like less effective salt case baking
I think their solution was to have slaves do the sun baked toiling instead of doing the work themselves.
From what I've read in books like The Odyssey, and The Illiad, they applied olive oil afterwards for moisturization and to soothe burns, chaffs, and cracks.