Yale scientist decided not to take a shower and recounted his experience five years later | James Hamblin says there are benefits to spacing out showers

James Hamblin, professor at the Yale School of Public Health, made the decision to stop showering. For five years now, he has said he is “perfectly fine” and “feels normal”. The specialist in preventive medicine is 37 years old and told about his experience in the magazine Atlantic, where he usually writes.

“I stopped showering and life went on. We spend two full years of our life bathing. How much time (and money and water) is wasted? “he reckoned in a 2016 article. This year he wrote a note in which he remarked that you should always wash your hands, but that you should not be so persistent with other parts of the body. body in terms of water use.

The five years without a shower resulted in a book, Clean: the new science of skin and beauty to do less. “I know a lot of people who swim very little. I knew it was possible, but wanted to try it for myself to see what the effect would be.”, she spoke about her 2015 decision. “Over time your body gets used to it more and more, so it doesn’t smell that bad if you don’t use deodorant and soap. And your skin does. not as greasy when you stop using harsh soaps. “

According to Hamblin, “A lot of people use shampoo to remove oils from their hair, then apply conditioner to add synthetic oils. If you can break this cycle, your hair will end up looking like it was when you have started using these products. “However, he stressed that” the main thing is to understand that it takes time, it does not happen overnight, it is not immediate. “

The scientist was a gradualist. She started using less shampoo, soap, and deodorant, and bathing less often than she did every day. “There were times I wanted to take a shower because I missed himIt smelled bad and it looked like there was grease. But it started to happen to me less and less. ”

In the 2016 memo, after a year had passed, he wrote that “body odor is the product of bacteria that live on our skin and feed on the oily secretions of sweat and the sebaceous glands that are within. the basis of our skin. Hair follicles “. He detailed that “When you shower aggressively, you destroy ecosystems. They repopulate quickly, but the species are imbalanced and tend to favor the types of microbes that produce odors. “There follows a process of regulation. »Your ecosystem reaches a stable state and you stop smelling bad. You don’t smell like rose water. You just smell like a person. Hamblin clarified that it was not that his body did not emit odors, but that “The populations of microbes in my body don’t produce the classic body stench they always did.”

In an interview, they asked him if he was worried about smelling bad and that people around him wouldn’t say anything to him out of politeness. He spoke with his relatives who said he didn’t smell bad. “For most of our history we have had smells that were part of the way we communicated with others,” he said of it. “So we hope that people don’t smell or smell the perfume, cologne, shower gel, otherwise it means they smell bad. If there is a detectable human odor, it is negative. “he added.

How to maintain hygiene without swimming?

“I rinse when I need it or when I want, just with water, quickly, especially when my hair seems to wake me up or if I have something visibly dirty”, He said. “But you can exfoliate, you can remove the oils just by rubbing with your hands and combing your hair every now and then. And that’s it.” What he has never stopped doing is washing his hands and brushing his teeth.

“Most people did not have access to running water for the past 100 years“, he said of the bathroom routine. “It was something that maybe royalty could do, kings and queens, but people could only do occasionally. Maybe they entered a river or a lake, but it didn’t was not something we had to do every day. ” To which they add that “a lot of people used homemade soaps and did not use them every day, because they were very aggressive on the skin”.

The bathroom “is a very new event in the history of mankind”

The bathroom “is a very new event in the history of mankind: we have to devote so much time, money and resources to bathing. “He stressed. I am curious to think that we may be doing too much and that it could be beneficial to reduce spending,” he said in this regard.

“The microbes on our skin are as important for its appearance and for our health as the gut microbiota for the digestive system”, He said. “Over the past decade, thanks to DNA sequencing technology, we know that microbes are everywhere and usually don’t cause disease. It’s a very small minority that do.” Ergo, that should make people “Think back to what you are trying to do when you wash, because of course we want to get rid of disease caused by germs, but we don’t want to get rid of all of them. ” He defined microbes as “the interface between the natural world and us”.

Hamblin defined the shower as “a preference “and said” not a medical necessity“. “I’m not telling people that they should give up (the bath,” he said. Additionally, he advised people to try showering less, using less shampoo and milder deodorants. . “It can start with more showers. In short, less frequent, colder, less soap,” he stressed. It should not be something dramatic, “he concluded.