The Hygienic Yuck! Sloven Factor

"The idea that we need to use soap all over our body, every day, is not founded in any type of science. I've ended up using less water, saving some plastic bottles, money and time. My body, and my skin, are fine."

"Regular washing took off in different places at different times, but it mainly happened over the second half of the 20th Century."

"Before the invention of indoor plumbing or mass-produced soaps, it wasn't even an option. Throughout history soap was a luxury good or something that you made yourself -- not something that you used every day."

"We've gotten a lot better, culturally, about not judging people about all kinds of things, but when people smell or don't use deodorant, somehow it's OK to say, 'You're gross' or 'Stay away from me!' and it gets a laugh."

"I'm trying to push back against the sense of there being some universal standard of normalcy."

Dr. James Hamblin, lecturer, Yale School of Public Health

 

"If you shower regularly, you can deplete the amount of bacteria and oil on your skin, and increase its dryness."

"However, your skin is very resilient and it is easy to replace the oils because it is producing them all the time."

"When a product says it kills 99.9 percent of bacteria, it only takes away a chunk; it could grow back within hours."

Dr. Matthew Hardman, wound healing expert, Hull York Medical School

Showers feel fabulous — but how frequent is too frequent for skin ecology?   www.boelke-art.de/Getty Images

The author of Clean: the New Science of Skin and the Beauty of Doing Less, Dr.James Hamblin, cites his own personal experience with cutting back on what most people consider to be normal daily hygiene; soaping one's body thoroughly every morning as we shower and get dressed to face the day, refreshed. He has himself not made use of soap, he tells anyone who will listen, in five years. He does wash his body with water, occasionally moistening his hair. While still regularly washing his hands with soap and water, vital, he stresses for the prevention of disease transmission.

The impressive, but not altogether convincing argument for taking fewer showers revolves around skin microbiome represented by trillions of micro-organisms living on the surface of the skin, comprised of roughly a thousand species of bacteria and some 80 species of fungi. They, and the oils our body constantly produces, in all probability led to the noxious fumes enveloping the nobility at European royal courts in the past, necessitating the use of perfumes to cover somewhat unpleasant odours. 

And we have a German physician to thank for the understanding of just how transmissible deadly pathogens can be leading to frightful numbers of maternal deaths during childbirth, that gave impetus to a new science of surgical hygiene. 

 

Some of the microbes making their home on our skin feed off our skin oils, stripped away when soap is used in what we consider to be the normal routine of hygienic practices. The prevention of pathogens from entering the body, reducing inflammation and reducing opportunities of skin conditions like eczema and psoriasis to arise are linked to the important support role our immune system plays aided by skin microbiome.

Taking regular showers represents an environmental factor that can disrupt skin microbiome. So what do medical experts do?  Dr.Hamblin starts his day "doing less". 

 

Diagnoses of psoriasis, eczema and dermatitis have risen in recent years with studies pointing to environmental factors like irritants and allergens triggering the immune system, thus contributing to an increase in people with eczema. Some experts attribute skin conditions in children to the "hygiene hypothesis"; that early exposure to germs aids a child's immune system in developing resistance to infections.

"We know that washing with soaps is harmful to the skin barrier, especially with conditions such as eczema."

"This could potentially be down to changes in the microbiome, but the research is still too early to tell."

"[No evidence exists that washing  your hands is bad for skin microbiome]."

Dr. Helen Alexander, St.John's Institute of Dermatology, King's College London