…and L’Air du Temps for important occasions.
Love’s as in Love’s Baby Soft?
@InfinityMan, you’re gonna make me say it? Okay, fine! Just the sack! The sack was hanging down to his knees! NOT gonna cause the women to swarm around him like flies. :">
Oh my goodness, I think I’m going to get the vapors (fans oneself vigorously, grabs for the smelling salts). 
My Dad used to love a certain perfume. My stepmom heard about this after they got married. She bought some, but instead of the intended reaction, when he went to hug her, my Dad recoiled and said “WHAT is that smell?!” Apparently on my stepmother, that perfume smells like bug spray on her.
That’s what the teachers/admins at my junior high and HS in the old building got for having gym shower rooms where the faucets and sometimes even the entire piping/shower heads were ripped out and missing since sometime in the mid-'80s or earlier.
Kinda hard to have a shower without them…
Also, some of the teachers I’ve had in HS had BO which would put the stinkiest teen boys at my junior high/high school to shame.
One of the times I was sent down to the dean during my first semester freshman year of HS was likely due to equating one BO laden teacher with Limburger after he started on another insult-laden tirade against me and other classmates for what he viewed as our perpetual inadequacies.
Another time another HS classmate from the same teacher/class joined me in the dean’s office for suggesting the BO laden teacher take a shower.
Charlie, Jontue and Windsong!!
I’m sure it wasn’t the teachers’ fault that your elite public magnet had crappy facilities.
I know…just saying they can’t blame the kids or the teachers for that as it was a systemic problem due to budget constraints and other issues with the board of ed during the late '60s when the steep cuts for education started and the cumulative effects became apparent even to the alums who were middle/HS students in the early-mid '80s.
Teenagers - boys and girls - are usually very self-conscious about their bodies. Especially, as the OP explained, a 16yo that looks young. If he never had a massage before and is put into a locker room with naked guys and kept waiting for what seems like an eternity, he may have just decided it was all too weird. Seeing naked guys in an of itself may not have been a big deal, but having to sit there with no place to really look, especially if they wanted to chat, would weird out a lot of teens.
I am not a big spa goer, but in my limited experience, I waited in the waiting room in our clothes and then went to a changing/locker room to take off clothes and put on a robe and then into the massage room. At my gym, people change and move on out. Nobody sitting around chatting in the buff.
I have blocked out HS gym class in my mind. We had a pool, so definitely had some showers. In jr high we has to wear these awful uniforms with our names on everything - even our sneakers. Now my kids barely change (unless they are wearing jeans) and don’t think they ever took a shower at school.
By the way, in middle school the girls had dedicated lockers in the gym, but the boys had to carry their stuff back and forth (as the boys locker room was used for HS JV sports). Certainly stunk up their regular lockers.
At expensive hotel spas, it’s not at all unusual for there to be a “relaxation room” where one goes to wait before the spa appointment. What seems unusual to me is the nudity factor. It’s certainly not anything I have EVER experienced at a luxury hotel spa.
My gym teacher explained, in 7th (our first yr in jr high,) that we sweat regardless of whether we ran down the field,as a forward, or hung in the back as defense. One rule for all: shower.
The boy’s equivalent in this decade is Axe. It also does not cover up the stink but somehow they never got the message.
The scariest thing is they are selling those horrific gym uniforms we wore on Etsy…someone actually thinks they are vintage cute…gag, gag. There was only one single girl that looked cute/good in hers and she looked cute/good in anything i bet. I’d take naked anyday over ever having to put that thing on again. Naked old men are low on the scary thing compared to women in those gym uniforms. No wonder we hardly ever had to fight off the guys in high school - the visual of “us girls” in those uniforms were probably seared in their brains.
@skieurope The motto for the Axe generation seems to be more is more.
Axe!!! Gag. Speaking of the devil, I got Axed on the bus today. It did not cover the sweat and acetaldehyde stench from (what I assume was) the night before partying.
Our gym uniform was hideous. Found a pic on line but its so bad the link won’t work. Not sure when we stopped wearing these lovely things.
We also had a large laundry bin of black bathing suits we had to take a suit from for swimming days. eewwww.
Oh and definitely forced to gang shower at least in middle school.
Maybe this link works
https://thevintagetraveler.■■■■■■■■■■■■■/tag/gymsuit/ Ours was like this but baby blue with a matching attached cloth belt and snaps of course. Snaps!
Yikes. Our gym suits were blue and, yes, my name was beautifully embroidered on the left side. Elastic waist, snaps, what’s not to love? Can you imagine what our daughters’ reactions would have been? Unless they are so retro that they’re cool…ha!
Man, we just had shorts and a PE shirt. I’m SO grateful we didn’t have a one-piece button down concoction. It would have been unflattering and tough to fit properly for years of wear. Outfits with buttons are tough to fit properly on more buxom figures as well.
Our PE uniforms were also hideous. They were one piece, stretchy things. I was a skinny thing, but if you had an ounce of fat on you, it was all too obvious. And the color looked like bile.
Our PE uniforms were also hideous. They were one piece, stretchy things. I was a skinny thing, but if you had an ounce of fat on you, it was all too obvious. And the color looked like bile.