Interesting thread.
I used to love my Pretty Peach set. I had the bath gel, the body lotion and a long-handled puff that you filled with the matching talc. I looked it up on eBay a few years ago and saw one going for about £90! The packaging was so appealing to me with the peach as the top.
Ugh, Poison. It gave me the worst sick-headaches. Apologies to people who love it. I often used to think the women who wore it must have had a very poor sense of smell (or mine was very sensitive - which it is, I suppose, as I can recognise most perfumes and notes). A bit like the young men who douse themselves in Lynx expecting to 'pull a bird' and being disappointed when they get turned away by any female with a nose. Walking fire hazards!
I live in a rural area where we'd frequently go days with power cuts. We couldn't have a bath but that doesn't mean my mum would let us go without a good wash. She'd boil the kettle on a camping stove in the lean-to and fill the sink for us to wash. This method came in handy a few years ago when I'd had both ankles pinned after breaking them and was put in non-weight-bearing plasters for a few weeks. My OH would wheel me to the downstairs loo where I'd sit on the loo, put towels around me and wash with a Ramy sponge (love those things).
I don't accept the excuse of not having access to a bath as acceptable. I'm from a family of miners that still had an outside toilet until I was seven and bathed in a tin bath in front of the fire. We'd all bath in it before the men came home then they'd bath in our soapy water!
I worked for a while with a woman living a few hundred yards down the road from me. It was common for us to pick up lifts as a lot of us rurals worked in the same big hospital 30 miles away. I'd go 10 miles out of my way to pick other colleagues up as she didn't wash and stunk the department out - sick-inducing stink, not just BO. Our manager told her several times that she'd been complained about but she used the non-excuse of having no hot water to bath. She came on to me not long before I left quite angry that I'd never offered her a lift even though we lived so close. As I was leaving (and she'd caught me during a PMT-induced rage) I let her have it both barrels about how she was so dirty and smelly that no one wanted her near them and that she was obviously too lazy to boil a kettle and wash in the sink and take her clothes to a laundrette. That it was a disgrace she was turning up for work at a hospital smelling like a 5-day old run-over skunk and that I'd be reporting her to HR and top management. Which I did.
Quite a few people signed a department petition about her and after several warnings which she was either defiant about or complained about not being able to afford to wash (someone left a bar of soap on her desk after that), she was sacked. She lost a great job because she didn't mind upsetting colleagues and patients with her lazy/dirty ways. Serves her right as far as I was concerned. Absolutely no need for it.
How the hell do these people think we managed 50/60 years ago? My nan would be amazed if she was alive to see a power shower these days!
Sorry, I'm ranty again. My OH often calls me Mrs Angry (well, at least once a month!).