How Often Do You Shower?

[canyonwalker]

A minor kerfuffle erupted on social media last week when a few Hollywood celebrities wrote that they don't shower/bathe themselves or their children every day. Reactions ranged from, "That's disgusting!" to "This is wealthy people showing their un-self-conscious privilege by conspicuously eschewing a luxury [the ability to take a shower, apparently] that not all of us have," to, "Well, that's actually okay and appropriate." ...The latter being said by medical clinicians who wandered into the fray.

I'm with the latter group. I don't shower every day.

No, I don't reject grooming as some kind of bizarre fashion statement.

No, I'm not trying to flex on people who don't have running water. (How many people who lack running water have computers or smartphones and Internet connections and use them to follow Hollywood celebrities on Twitter, anyway?)

I'm simply in the category of not needing to shower every day and choosing not to do it out of social pressure.

I don't need to shower every day because I don't get that dirty. I have a desk job and I work from home. I don't get dirty or even break a sweat at that. I have air conditioning, so even when it's hot out in the summer I can minimize sweating indoors. Understand this doesn't mean I shower once a week or something ridiculous like that. I'm just saying that when I choose to skip showering once or twice a week I'm not a disgusting mess.

Sometimes, of course, I do something sweaty or dirty. I hike on a dirt trail. I swim in the pool (which gets chlorine all over me). I travel on an airplane— which leaves a smell in my hair and who-knows-what on my skin. In these cases I generally take a shower that day. See, that's the flip side of being free of the tyranny of I-must-shower-every-morning. I clean when I'm dirty, even if it means taking a shower in the afternoon or evening.

Keep reading: ...And I Don't Always Use Soap, Either!

Comments

[kjn]

Pretty much me, too. To some degree, the main value of taking a shower in the morning is that it wakes one up.

FWIW, I think the use case of having a phone and an internet connection but not running water is more common than you assume. Bandwidth is essentially free once it's installed. Water, not so much. California's water shortages is one example. Many islands are another. Refugee camps a third.

[canyonwalker]

I knew as I wrote the line about Twitter and running water some know-it-all would try to score points on it. So I wrote it carefully to forestall that. Apparently I underestimated the propensity of know-it-alls to selectively read only certain words in the sentence and respond to the argument they imagine I made. And for know-it-alls living thousands of miles away to try to tell a person who's lived in California for 25 years what's happening there.

[culfinriel]

Offs. On many levels. Stay healthy, whatever that means re: cleaning up. Open sores? Bad. Cracked skin? Bad. Smelly? Depends on cultural and personal standards, frankly. Also, frustratingly, for some people it depends on their biochemistry and that's hard to control and no, it isn't just about how often they bathe or what with.

Consideration of access to safe water? Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahaha, etc. There's a whole industry based on telling us we stink and are ugly. It doesn't give a damn about water.

Mind you, I do not like being hairy and smelly. Otoh, my standards for that are apparently not the air brushed instagram filtered version. I bathe to feel clean, to remove my sweat because it irritates my skin badly and causes problems, to remove layers of sunscreen and insect repellent because those keep me alive and healthy but also need to be removed occasionally. I also like to feel that my hair doesn't look totally awful so will make some efforts in that regard. I dry off and use a bit of something powdered in spots because fungal infections suck.

Bathing every day for no reason other than marketing is a nonstarter for me. I hate that it is exceptionally difficult to find things that work for cleaning and occasional deodorizing that are not full of stenchy undying perfumes. Like, fine, if you wanna smell like grass, roses, and cigar smoke, you can choose to add that fragrance to your person. The fact that it costs me extra time and money to not have the perfume drives me up a wall.

Frankly, perfumes do not go well with my attempts to breathe, and if they were old school, you gotta get hella close to smell 'em, I wouldn't have a problem. But omg, this everything has to smell fake and that means it's clean and if it doesn't you are a garbage person is a bad cycle of marketing lies. Also makes it hard for me to breathe.

Seriously, once upon a time the smell of bleach or ammonia or phenol (old school Lysol) meant "clean". Now, they think it's better to have obnox miasmatic perfume clouds in Lysol and gods forbid your bleach actually smell like bleach and not bleach plus rotting vegetation.

I, uh, get annoyed about the obsessive cleaning and perfuming. Sorry.

[canyonwalker]

Scent-free products are big in our house, too, as both of us have allergies to certain scents and/or the chemicals used to produce them artificially.