It is a standing policy of the Libertarian Alliance Blog to publish all responses that are not illiterate and not likely to get us into trouble. The recent attack on me is neither. However, I am so suspicious of some of its wording that I will not express the disgust that comes immediately to mind at this celebration of gross obesity. Under normal circumstances, I would rejoice that “Sierra-Jane Mitchell” is so fat she will almost certainly die soon, and, even otherwise, will probably never have children – a mercy to the gene pool and to the rest of us who have to compete for oxygen.

But “her” continual references to “vinegar baths” raise what is for me an obvious suspicion. I have never, so far as I can tell, so much as used the word “vinegar” in any of my contributions to this blog. But these references are both precise and accurate. I therefore suspect that “Sierra-Jane Mitchell” is not, in fact, a 500-pound cocoa-butter goddess, but a boy in my class at school who has seized on a comment I made last year and is now trying to make fun of me. He is welcome to try, but must accept that – as he and his lefty friends like to say – words have consequences. The number of people here who can produce more than two coherent sentences without grammatical catastrophe is very small. The number who can pad them out with fake body-positive rhetoric while shoehorning in details from my writing is smaller still. And since one of them has been repeatedly humiliated in debates, smells of rancid cooking oil, and can’t run upstairs without gasping like a deflating bouncy castle, I think I have my man.

Once the summer holiday is over, I will set about a course of verbal torment. I know precisely how to make people wish they were dead – and I will. For now, I will explain the reference to vinegar, so that the real “Sierra-Jane” might at least stop stinking before term begins.

I do not use chemical deodorants. Why would I? They are jars of skin rot in pastel packaging. The main active ingredient is aluminium chlorohydrate – an industrial metal compound that works by plugging your sweat ducts. Add synthetic musks and a name like “Ultra Cool Blast” or “Glacier Rush,” and you have the modern British idea of hygiene: perfume glued to filth.

I have no interest in smelling like a minor nightclub toilet, nor in spending my forties wondering whether the itch under my arm is cancer. Instead, every morning after my shower, I rub white vinegar over my entire body. And I mean not just the armpits, but the groin, the feet, the back of the neck, the chest – every place where sweat emerges. The vinegar stings briefly, because unlike “Sierra-Jane,” my pores are not blocked with the runoff from a decade of sausage rolls. It evaporates in minutes. There is no lingering salad smell. There is nothing at all – just clean skin that stays clean for at least a day.

This is not a fad I invented. The Greeks rinsed their mouths and bodies with ὄξος (vinegar), as Hippocrates recommends in Regimen in Acute Diseases. The Romans, who knew more about personal hygiene than any modern “wellness influencer,” used vinegar in their baths. Pliny the Elder records that acetum in balneis utile est, odorem corporis reficit et fatigationem tollit – vinegar in baths is useful; it restores the body’s natural odour and relieves fatigue. In the early modern period, Ambroise Paré prescribed vinegar rinses for wounds, for the mouth after surgery, and for daily washing.

The principle is simple: sweat itself doesn’t smell. The smell comes from bacteria feeding on it. Vinegar kills the bacteria and changes the skin’s pH so they can’t come straight back. It’s effective, and it doesn’t require a subscription to whatever “natural” deodorant brand is trending on TikTok.

The result is the absence of smell – which, for the avoidance of doubt, is the correct smell for a civilised man: not lavender mist, not mango crush, not “cocoa butter self-acceptance.” Instead: nothing.

Most boys at my school – including “Sierra-Jane” – treat hygiene as a kind of optional side quest. They drench themselves in aerosol sprays to hide the fact they haven’t washed properly in days. The smell is uniquely offensive: a base layer of sweat and unchanged underclothes, topped with synthetic fruit. They waddle down the corridors in uniforms that could double as family tents, leaving a wake of damp polyester and low self-esteem.

Vinegar solves all that. It works without fuss, lasts all day, and doesn’t make you smell like a Poundland candle. That alone should recommend it for general use – but I doubt “Sierra-Jane” will take my advice. I suspect he’s more interested in keeping up the fantasy of being an enormous, cocoa-butter-scented Renaissance muse than in actually smelling human.

The ancients didn’t need adverts to be clean. They washed. They scraped. They anointed their skin with oils and preserved it with vinegar. The early moderns – even in cities where open sewers ran through the streets – used vinegar for body care. And yet here we are, in 2025, with a population so gullible it believes the solution to body odour is to glue perfume to bacteria.

If this blog exchange has achieved anything, perhaps it is that one or two readers will realise you don’t need Boots’ latest aluminium spray to smell respectable. A bottle of white vinegar costs 35p in Sainsbury and lasts for weeks, and it won’t leave you wondering whether the lump under your arm is “probably nothing.”

So, “Sierra-Jane,” enjoy your annual bake in Benidorm. Spend your fortnight there wallowing in cheap lager and carcinogenic sun creams. I know who you are; and, once we’re back, and I start drawing attention to your stretchmarks and the stains you leave behind on plastic chairs, you will wish you had never been born. Soon enough, you will agree: the smell of nothing will always beat the smell of you.

Related posts:

Why I’m Fat, Fabulous, and Furious: A Response to Bryan’s Ancient-Greek Skinnyboy Delusion Roman Life Was Not That Bad: Reply to Sebastian Wang Obesity in the Ancient World Further Thoughts on Ancient Obesity Hippocrates on Health and the Fat Boys at My School GDP and Income Distribution in the Roman Empire Who Bombed First? Britain, Germany, and the Origins of Strategic Bombing in World War II

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