I am just working with a sauna-making company. so any feedback will be used for commercial advantage ;-)

You can't be me, I'm taken

It has a much more specific reason, I read. I read it originated at the end of WWII, when US GIs travelled around France and in Paris, and had their only real experience of people who lived under occupation for years. For, soap was rationed, with the German Army carting off production for itself; to boot, many people couldn't buy many new clothes and water for washing was also constrained.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

I completely buy your morning/evening shower argument and I'd add that the social pressure to smell "nice" begins in middle school and is so intense that you have to be Brad Pitt to dare to smell bad. But living in a city that is a lot more densely packed than most European locales, I can't agree with your "3X the nose distance" theory. Except for the homeless (and every once in a while, a recently immigrated cab-driver), New Yorkers almost never smell. And this is a city where a huge proportion of the population is foreign-born!