Soapier Than Thou

There are some things in life that you can be sure of. The sun rises every day. The crow trying to cross the road as your car approaches will fly away at the last moment. The other lane always moves faster when you are stuck in traffic. And so on. Of course there is always something in the news that strikes at the foundation of our faith in such things. I am told that the earth's magnetic field may flip directions and in fact does so routinely (but not frequently, thank god!). But at the moment that is not what is exercising my mind. I have had to question something more ordinary which I had taken for granted.

Take the everyday item, bath soap. You apply soap on your wet body, the soap suds grab on to dirt and grime and then they get rinsed off along with the dirt. Simple, isn't it? So it was absolutely annoying to find out that the new shower gel that I recently decided to try bucked this rule. No matter how much I rinsed, the soapy feeling on my skin refused to go away. It boggles my mind that in the name of improving a product or adding new features to it, its fundamental purpose is being eroded.

To make matters worse, when I grabbed the towel to dry myself (after using up a lot of water in vain to get rid of the soapiness), it did not seem to absorb water. It sort of spread the water around while remaining dry itself, displaying a disinterested attitude. What good is a towel that does not absorb water? Something was clearly afoot. Since I did not suddenly wake up on a strange planet, I decided to do some research into this.

I had been noticing that towels in general lose their absorbing capacity over time. But I could not see why that should be. The snow white towels in hotel rooms that are fluffy white with a faint smell of chlorine (evidently for disinfecting them between guests) seem to remain super absorbent. You only need to bring the towel close to your body to see the water drops flying off and attaching themselves to the towel. So what was going on at the home front? 

It turns out that in the quest for ever softer towels, we have been using fabric softeners which counteract the absorbency. In fact there is advice available online (surprise!) on how to keep your towels from becoming waterproof. Wash with vinegar and then with baking soda, etc. Then repeat till the towel is back to being a towel. That seems like a lot of work but the alternative is to buy fresh towels. If the softeners are the culprit, I guess we should wash the towels without using them. I have to give that a try but who knows how many washes will be needed before all the softeners are removed? In the meantime, I discovered that the simple cotton towels I had acquired in India  worked much better than the soft terry towels. As an added bonus, some of them are not so soft and will also exfoliate your skin! I should have known. After all cotton has been used in India from the earliest of times. 

While researching all this, I came across an article that argues that there is no need to shower every day, upending another entrenched belief. This was really turning out to be a big day for questioning what I had assumed were settled things. Astonishingly, the article makes a good case for not showering at all. Think of all the water and the money spent on soap that you can save. If you are still not sold, then I have one word for you: microbiome. Yes, the trillions of microbes on your skin that offer wonderful benefits and protection, get washed away by all the soap that you apply. And there isn't enough time between daily showers for the microbe population to recover. So giving up showering altogether is actually healthier according to James Hamblin who has literally written the book on this topic. He asks us 'to think of our skin as an ecosystem to maintain rather than an outer barrier that should be pristine'. He has in fact stopped showering and he says, quoting his girlfriend, he just smells like a person. That is reassuring indeed.

Still, it does appear to be an extreme step to stop showering altogether. First of all, I actually enjoy a shower. Besides I have been brought up to shower or bathe daily. According to Hindu scriptures (yes, our scriptures do cover all aspects of day to day living), bathing is a daily ritual enjoined on us. But when that prescription was made, a bath surely just meant a dip in the river and certainly did not involve moisturizing soap or the never-rinse-off gel. So maybe there is a middle path here - keep showering but jettison the soap? Something to consider, I think. Anyway if I decide to either stop showering altogether like Hamblin or just stop using soap, I will be sure NOT to let you know!