I washed my hair without shampoo this morning. But only because I slept too late.
I washed my hair with bar soap today, but I do that everyday.
I did not shampoo this morning, but I did use conditioner.
Also I had four things or so to post today, and in the harsh morning light they all look dumb.
A new policy? As long as you don't extend this not-posting-dumb-things rule to commenters, I'll be okay.
Really?
Yes, really. When I had my hair longer I used shampoo and conditioner. But it's currently buzz-cut short and for my oily head bar soap's fine.
I use conditioner with most showers, but shampoo only weekly. Today was a shampoo day, and if you could run your fingers through my soft, fine hair, you would forget all about goosenecks.
Amen to 7.
Well, I scrapped most of one and just salvaged the only part that was probably interesting at all. And just posted it.
For a while I was neither happy nor unhappy with this experiment, but I feel like this experiment has been a colossal failure ever since I swam in a pool on Sun. The pool fucked with my skin and hair, and just washing off with water doesn't seem to be enough to unfuck it. But I'm planning to persevere for a while longer, for reasons I can't really imagine.
for reasons I can't really imagine
For science, urple.
No, I thought about washing half my body every day, for science, but this can't qualify.
I hadn't swam in a pool, but I went in the river twice. Neither time seemed to make any difference, but it's a pretty clean river.
I still don't understand the point of the experiment. What's the purported benefit?
See, 15 identifies part of my undoing. It's good if you're having skin or hair troubles, I think.
I still don't understand the point of the experiment. What's the purported benefit?
I agree with 16, but, if we're all being defrauded by Big Soap, I'd like to know about it. The idea that soap is an unecessary* product stuck me as so bizarre (and I would have guessed obviously wrong) that I felt compelled to test the theory myself. It's clearly less necessary than I would have guessed.
* I mean, obviously it's not necessary. You'll survive without it. But I would have thought you might be ostracized.
WHEREAS, in contrast, those people who claim that neither soap nor shaving cream is needed for shaving your face are insane. (Or, rather, I would guess, just lightly bearded.) I've run that experiment too, and it did not go well.
and if you could run your fingers through my soft, fine hair, you would forget all about goosenecks
Ew.
I've never shaved my pits or legs with soap or shaving cream or anything. I think I had razor burn once.
Most of my hair has rubbed off my legs or something, or I stopped growing it there much, but I don't shave them anymore.
Yes, but I suspect you are rather lightly bearded.
Most of my hair has rubbed off my legs or something
Does this actually happen? I shave way less often than I did in my teens and early twenties, and it doesn't seem like my legs are very hairy, but I attribute that to being less self-conscious about all things appearance-related than I was then.
I didn't shave my legs at all for about five years in my mid-20s, and one of the most surprising things was how long it took to get the leg hair properly grown out to begin with. It stuck straight up forever.
those people who claim that neither soap nor shaving cream is needed for shaving your face are insane
No they aren't. Desirable, but not essential. All they do is soften the hair, and you can do this with just hot water. Just drape a hot towel over your face for a couple of minutes and use an extremely sharp razor.
Or you can use oil instead - King of Shaves, for example. Has the advantage that you don't need any water at all.
15: sSimplifying your life.
Given how much effort it takes to get my hair to sit flat if I haven't shampooed it for a few days, I doubt it would simplify much.
I would consider oil an alternative to soap or shaving cream. I agree it could be used instead of them, but that's not saying much.
All they do is soften the hair
And lubricate.
Does this actually happen?
Maybe it's just aging hormones or something? I never shaved my knees or above, because my leg hair was always bleached from the sun, but I definitely had hair above my knees in high school, and I don't now.
My shin hair is now thin enough to be left alone and unnoticeable, although maybe twice a year I shave it, before a fancy event or something.
Mind you, I'm not claiming that no one has success shaving sans soap/shaving cream/oil. I'm claiming that those people who claim that anyone will have success without soap/shaving cream/oil are wrong. In my case, very wrong. I gave the experiment plenty of time. It only got worse.
Given how much effort it takes to get my hair to sit flat if I haven't shampooed it for a few days, I doubt it would simplify much.
Well, if you were to try this experiment, you'd have to suffer through that worst period and get to the far side where everything evens out. I will vouch that going a few days without shampoo is no indication of what it'll be like to go totally off.
I have not grown less hairy-legged as I've aged, although that would be nice if it ever happened.
My back has gotten much hairier as I've aged.
I've also had more nose hair, but that's what the scissors by the copier are for.
I generally like hairiness on women and men, but I'd feel self-conscious not-shaving if I were hairier.
I definitely have a highly visible sock line in my leg hair.
As men grow older the hair leaves from their head and tries out a bunch of new neighbourhoods, with a view to finding a suitable place to retire. I thought this was well known.
Most of my hair has rubbed off my legs or something
Ah, so this must be what happened to those people in the adult films.
37: I just have argyle-patterned hair on my calves.
It's actually the same thread of hair connecting your scalp and your crotch. Over time, as you tug on your crotch, it works free from your scalp and you're left with a long hair inside you.
Well, if you were to try this experiment, you'd have to suffer through that worst period and get to the far side where everything evens out. I will vouch that going a few days without shampoo is no indication of what it'll be like to go totally off.
Sure, but suffeirng through the worst period is less simple than not suffering at all.
Sure, but suffeirng through the worst period is less simple than not suffering at all.
Starting from the status quo, sure, change is also less simple than no change. But if we all stopped using soap or shampoo on our children, they could grow up free from these chains. Is the theory, at least.
Ideally we would schvitz instead of showering, but until I get a proper banya in my house, showering with soap it is. I try not to do it super-often (more than once every 24 hours) but unless I can get a regular schvitz on, I do not smell terrific without soap.
I do not smell terrific without soap
But have you ever showered regularly with water but without soap for more than a few days in a row, in order to test this claim?
Ideally we would schvitz instead of showering
Or so the mullahs would have you believe. Actually, seriously: according to whom?
I alternate shampoo & baking soda every couple of days, & my hair is slightly gummier or frizzier accordingly, but weeks w/o shampoo didn't make much difference. We have sda and vinegar in the bathroom for handy spot cleaning, so no big hassle.
I alternate shampoo & baking soda every couple of days, & my hair is slightly gummier or frizzier accordingly, but...
the cookies really suck during shampoo week.
45: Yeah, I did, in order to figure out what was causing a rash I used to have--painful red bumps under my arms. I had it for about 15 years running, and then got rid of it with schvitzing. The kind of sweating that happens at the banya expels a lot of oily stuff that I think is the smelly part of sweat. If I go often enough, I don't have to shower as much or use soap as often.
46: I'll just speak for myself then. It makes my skin clear and clean for weeks without soap. Otherwise I start to feel greasy, especially in the summer.
The 18th-century-and-before studyin' types would know better than I, but my understanding was that in the Western pre-regular soap times, people had lots of skin diseases and parasites. Much of that was probably collective sanitary conditions, how closely folks lived with livestock, etc., but regular soaping surely kills a lot of the bacteria that are hanging out waiting for a break in the skin to commence partying.
I'd think clean clothes and bedding would be a big part of that, though -- a soapless modern is in a much cleaner environment than a rarely-bathed premodern.
The mistake y'all are making is the water. I'm not joking. I & the dogs do get rained on in the spring, and we use hoses on ourselves on the 90+ days.
51:Our elders had an insufficient quantity of clothes. I will start to stink after a few hours of sweating, but I rarely wear any t-shirts or shorts more than a couple hours without washing them. I have 50 shirts and twenty shorts, and change a half dozen times a day. I keep my crotch clean, and am manaical about my hands, using soap, hot water, and gelled alcohol 10-20 times a day. My nails are clipped short.
Every few months my hair gets tangled and matted, and then I'll shower.
I don't seem to stink, I have no pimples or boils, I get no complaints.
My shin hair is now thin enough to be left alone and unnoticeable, although maybe twice a year I shave it, before a fancy event or something.
UNFAIR.
The 18th-century-and-before studyin' types would know better than I, but my understanding was that in the Western pre-regular soap times, people had lots of skin diseases and parasites
Well, the 18th-century-and-before studyin' types would know better than I, too, but my understanding was that in the Western pre-regular soap times, people didn't shower daily.
I rather hate you people that no longer need to shave. (I could very well stop, I know, but my leg hair is dark and thick and I don't find it very aesthetically pleasing.)
51: At some point today I'll take a look into Kathy Brown's Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America and see what she has to say on the matter, if I can find it. I'm sure you're all waiting expectantly.
I forgot, I do clean dry towel down after a sweat, a few times a day.
I am a sweater (cashmere)(not a camera). If I showered every time I got sticky or dirty in Dallas, I would live under water. So I kinda just slowed down and gave up. Anyway, I mostly hate showers and feeling that dry and clean. It ain't natural.
My dogs have no odor either, including dog breath, but they do insist on a visit to a lake or creek once a week. They come out smelling like lake, which disappears in half an hour.
If I showered every time I got sticky or dirty in Dallas, I would live under water.
The dome is already made?
Summer is here in Dallas!
97,99,100,99 forecast this week, with dewpoints around 70 = heat index 100+. Ten degrees above normal.
We are ok on water in the area this year, lakes and reservoir seem high.
54, 58: Is Stephen Dedalus your hygiene role-model, bob?
53, 56: Right, but I thought the original claim was that our skin is all self-regulating. Yeah, cleaning/soaping everything around us probably takes care of many of the problems, as does quarentining sending the filthy lice children home to their filthy lice houses, but the soaping of people probably plays a role in our less flea-ridden era as well.
Though as Moby alludes, the reverse is true as well. If we didn't spend so much killing bacteria, we wouldn't have MRSA hanging out on our skin waiting to pounce.
57.last: I am!
If we didn't spend so much killing bacteria, we wouldn't have MRSA hanging out on our skin waiting to pounce.
I had to spend a full hour learning how to not spread MRSA. And I don't even see patients.
Again, a well-played con by Chopper. Well played indeed.
how closely folks lived with livestock
I've an affectionate cat who has now given me eye infections on four occasions by aggressive nuzzling (the first two during the day, and the latest two while I was asleep). He also managed to spray drool into both of my eyes at once while I was scratching behind his ear, but I avoided any medical consequences. Animals are disgusting.
61:My dogs are my role models, although like Dedalus and Joyce, they too are terrified of thunderstorms.
Took a look at cotton, which has an absorbency rate of 10% and a saturation rate of 25%. I have a hard time imagining an oil, odor, or bacterium that would not move from skin to cloth, especially with the aid of sweat.
And then you change.
The dogs are amazing, can literally become black from rolling in mud, and be clean in a half hour, without the aid of water. I don't know how it happens.
We do wash everything and vacuum a lot.
Animals are disgusting.
One of my cats routinely sneezes in my face. It's her special trick. She also appears to have a new found desire to vomit on me (twice now I've woken with her in the beginning vomit stages while she's curled up on my chest during the night).
She also appears to have a new found desire to vomit on me
Not new at all. You're not sleeping as soundly as before.
50 shirts and twenty shorts, and change a half dozen times a day
That sounds like a LOT more work than just using soap in the morning.
70:They are usually wet, dude. Getting nekkid and toweling down after waking up, after the walks, the yardwork, the store trips, then getting new clothes is something that happens anyway. Wearing a new set of clothes for every activity, well, I have different styles for everything.
Part of it started when I was showering or washing up and then getting wet again in 15 minutes. And then stinking. It's experience over theory, but I bet the oils and bacteria need a transmission medium to get to the clothes. Or self-regulatiing skin.
I have a friend whose house got a bad case of the MRSA about a year ago, and whose poor little ones have been periodically afflicted with it from time to time. I feel terrible for them; it's constant bleaching and alcoholing every surface in the house, and the damn thing still gets into the kids' little scrapes and cuts.
72: That is terrible. MRSA can be extremely dangerous, if the panic-inducing reports on television news are anything to go by.
My wife had MRSA twice in six months on two different parts of her body. She was tested and they found that she isn't "colonized," so the doctors said it's just one of those things that happens.
You know what's not fun? Going to the emergency room to have your pus drained because you're afraid of getting blood poisoning or having an even larger part of your body eaten from the inside.
72: If she's a particular blogger, it's been over two years she's been dealing with it.
She doesn't even work in a hospital or anything, though I suppose some kind of dual med/law students could be spreading the germs.
The sickest part is their mom got it while in the hospital giving birth to the littlest one. No one's in mortal peril because of it, I think, because they recognize it immediately now, but it does tend to affect little kids the worst; their immune systems are weaker and they tend to scrape themselves up more frequently.
75: Yes, that's who I'm thinking of. I forgot it had been that long, but the wee one is about two now. Jesus.
72 & 75: My first thought on reading that comment was, oh, that's why I started reading that blog. Except I think it was actually heebie who introduced me, maybe.
The liver-transplanted mother of course got MSRA, and was in isolation/quarantine whenever she went to the hospital. With the im-suppressant drugs she got everything else too, and brought it home. That is how I got into the habit of the hard-handwashing and alcohol everywhere, foam and gel, like three places in every room. And changing clothes.
I haven't had any antibiotics in ten years, and twice in twenty-five. Don't get infections or colds, cuts and scarpes heal fast.
Because my life is about being riddled with curiosity, who's the pustulent blogger?
I think you can follow most of the MRSA story here. She has since moved to a more private blog, which I won't link here, but you can get the backstory.
81: Tonks. She comments here very occasionally.
Whoops. I'll redact the link in 84.
And I am reminded that this has been going on for about 26 months.
The kind of sweating that happens at the banya expels a lot of oily stuff that I think is the smelly part of sweat.
My understanding is that the smelly part of sweat is actually (produced by) bacteria that feed on the sweat, not anything in the sweat itself. Wikipedia agrees with me.
Hokey Pokey has been known to sweat so much that he leaves sweat rings on the sheets.
Hokey Pokey has been known to sweat so much that he leaves sweat rings on the sheets.
I dread to ask where the rings are located.
Mostly around his head. There may be itty bitty, uh, cock rings, but I don't check inside his diaper that closely.
The definitive fulminatingnecrosisblogger is Peter Watts, who has numerous pictures. www.rifters.com.
Tonks' account is pretty grim, poor woman. I hate reading stuff like "we're enrolled in a Health Savings Account. Or, as I like to think of it, We Need to Get a Credit Card to Pay for Our Monthly Medications and Hope Like Hell No One Gets Sick Very Often." People shouldn't have to deal with that sort of thing.
67: Took a look at cotton, which has an absorbency rate of 10% and a saturation rate of 25%. I have a hard time imagining an oil, odor, or bacterium that would not move from skin to cloth, especially with the aid of sweat.
If you can believe that nice hockey girl who presented If Walls Could Talk: The History of the Home that's exactly what the Tudors used to think, that instead of cleaning yourself, you just need clean clothes.
poor tonks, that is so shitty. I had a horrible staph infection start on spider bites that were on my head, and then spread to my nose, because I touched these horrible open sores and then wanted to know if they smelled like evil infection, which they did naturally. here in the tropics every little nick and scratch is liable to get infected; before antibiotics people used to get "tropical ulcers" this way that just never healed. let's all take a moment to pray humanity doesn't just FAIL and return us to the pre-antibiotic era because they gave them to too many cows, or some shit.
94. I believe this was the prevailing wisdom until quite late in the 18th century. Personal cleanliness involved washing your face and hands (presumably with a get out clause for upper class women who slathered their faces with white lead), and wearing a clean shirt - shirts and women's slips were regarded as underwear at that date.
Lady Mary Wortley Montague was regarded as slovenly because her hands were dirty. The Earl of Sandwich (Roast beef and mustard between two slices of toast, originally) visited the Ottoman empire as a lad and said that Turkish ladies spoiled him for all other women, presumably because they bathed.
96 - really? What about hip baths and that sort of thing? Maybe that was more medicinal (Marat etc)...
97. Marat was quite late and attitudes were changing. Hip baths came into their own in the 19th.
Plus there was always a strand of water cure addicts (Bath, Baden, etc.). There were a few bagnios right through, but they were advertised as health clinics and used as brothels as much as bathing places. Not widely used for washing, and those who did were regarded as rather dubiously luxurious.
There's a big (sub only) Keith Thomas book-review in a recent LRB that discusses how some of the water-cure places (in Britain) can be linked with pre-Christian sacred sites...
18/30: I switched from shaving cream or soap to hot water ages ago and it works just as well for me. If you're looking for variables to control for, my beard grows fast, but my skin is also pretty smooth.
94, 96: That's what Brown says, basically, in Foul Bodies, if I remember correctly. (I couldn't locate my copy yesterday....maybe today!)
Also, on the not-using-soap-will-clear-up-skin-issues thing: most dermatologists will tell someone suffering from an eczema outbreak to limit showering to once every other day and to only use soap on the armpit/genital regions.
I keep sniffing my pits as this thread continues. I just wet down a paper towel and rubbed my cheat. It did not come back black and smelly.
I haven't actually thought about all this very much, but it does strike me as an example of the way fashion becomes morals and science.