Jenine asks if skipping showers is the next hot beauty trend and frankly, I don’t feel the need to shower or wash my hair daily.
I used to, when I was younger but I noticed that my skin was getting super dry and making my eczema worse, not to mention my hair getting oilier and oilier.
Currently, I wash my hair once to twice a week and shower every other day on average, but during the summer I admit to showering and washing my hair a little more often because it’s gross in the summer and too humid and hot otherwise.
However unless I am covered in dirt or super sweaty, I don’t shower daily, and in the winter it is so much better for my skin.
For my hair, I’ve noticed that it only gets oily and gross after the third day. Sometimes, if my hair looks fine by the fourth day, I don’t wash it until the fifth.
The more I wash my hair, the oilier it gets. It’s true!
It all depends on how much oil I produce and what my hair looks and feels like, that determines when I wash my hair.
A lot of people might find this completely disgusting to not shower daily or wash your hair daily, but I wager that we’re a nation that is just too freakily clean.
We’re germaphobes, or have you not noticed our commercials and our fixation on being clean?
When I turn on the TV all I see are commercials about how your house smells disgusting if it isn’t scented with something like lavender or that your countertops are hotbeds for disgusting germs if you don’t wipe them down with chemicals to kill 99.999% of bacteria (some of which I am sure are harmless or even good for you, it’s probably the bacteria that the wipes DON’T kill that is bad!), or that you stink if you don’t wear perfume or deodorant, or use scented bath products.
Studies have even proven that those hand sanitizers don’t do jack squat and may even be toxic (something I already intuitively figured out when the product first hit the market).
Update from The Holy Potato:
Anyway, yes, soap and water is preferred, but hand sanitizer is not bad when you can’t use soap and water (or when it’s too inconvenient, like when walking in to a hospital). And the point of using hand sanitizer in hospitals and doctors offices is to protect the patients and staff, not yourself, so please just do it and spread the word.
Ideally we want everyone to sanitize as they walk in the door from outside (and every hospital now has banks of hand sanitizer dispensers at the main entrances) and again before going into a patient or procedure room from the hallway/elevators/etc.
Then again on the way out from a patient/procedure room to the common areas, then again when leaving the hospital and entering the wide world, for a minimum of 4 hand cleaning events.
Compliance with that request is much easier with hand sanitizer than soap and water — if the dispensers are set up right you can get a glob and rub it in without even breaking your stride.
A little bacteria and being a little dirty is not going to kill you and may even be good for you, as it will boost your immune system rather than always being in a sterile environment, not being exposed to anything and therefore your body is unable to learn how to fight off any infections.
Being clean is good.
Being super clean to the point of obsessiveness (something I think we’re catapulting towards) is not better.
