Fancy cheap: pot scraper strigils!

For many years my fevered imagination cast desperately about. I read. I pondered. I wondered, “What the hell is a strigil, really?”

Basically it’s a scrapy gadget that they used in ancient Greece, in baths. After a hot sweaty naked wrestling match, sexy muscley men talking about philosophy oiled each other up in a steamy sauna and then scraped each other clean with one of these mystery implements.

After exercising or engaging in competition Greek athletes would scrape the dust off their body with a strigil. The process was facilitated by covering the body with olive oil prior to exercising. The curved handle allowed the strigil to be hung on the wall of the gymnasium, together with the sponge and the aryballos containing the oil (see Le sport dans la Grèce antique: du jeu á la compétition, D. Venhove, ed., Ghent, 1992, pp. 229-230, nos. 91-92).

It sounds great. The exercise makes you sweat, the hot air of the, well, whatever they called a Greek sauna or calidarium or place of hot baths and steaminess, loosenes up all the gunk in your pores, and the strigil scrapes off the layer of oil that dissolves the horrible scurfy layer of dead skin.

You too can fantasize about sweaty naked ancient Greek philosopher wrestlers while you scrape your oily body clean!

For lo! There is the $1.50 plastic pot scrubber!

It works perfectly. I recommend you get a two pack and scrape pots with one, your skin with the other. If you are *two muscley guys who have just wrestled* then skip the pots, use both the strigils, and send me the photos.

DIY Bath: Sugar, salt, and oil

A really, really good salt body scrub!