Bathing by candlelight was never more disgusting!

By Photonoumi.

There’s a lot of fat in the human body.

Even people who don’t LOOK fat have it. And do you know what you can make from fat? Soap!

Now let’s take a step back in time with this Scientific American article. Paris has a popular graveyard known as the Cemetery of the Innocents. It was SO popular, the graveyard started to run out of room. But even so, from 1100-1700, folks were perfectly fine with being buried there in mass graves (with as many as 1,500 people to a hole).

Cimetière du Père-Lachaise

So the graveyard started to stink. It stank so bad, if you walked into it, the color of your clothing would change! (Now THAT’S stinky!)

The problem was that since the bodies were all thrown in together, they couldn’t decompose properly. So instead of the people turning into compost, they were turning into . . . underground mounds of corpse fat!

The was so gross, the French king ordered all Paris graveyards closed in 1775. The fat mounds of dead bodies were dug up, and where possible, moved to the Catacombs under Paris (which are also pretty disgusting!).

And this 1852 article explains what was done with the giant mounds of underground corpse fat: It was turned into soap and candles. 

So I guess if you bathed by candlelight, you could use up a lot of corpse fat all at once! Ooh, maybe they had cool slogans:

"Great-Grandpa Pierre is in EVERY bar of Great-Grandpa Pierre’s Soap!"

Thanks to Dr. Michael Milone for the tip,

cemetery photo by Andrea Shaffer.