The Hot New Trend is Not Using Soap and Claiming You Don't Smell

Source – David Whitlock has not showered or bathed for 15 years, yet he does not have body odour. “It was kind of strange for the first few months, but after that I stopped missing it,” he says. “If I get a specific part of my body dirty, then I’ll wash that specific part” – but never with soap. As well as germs, soap gets rid of the skin’s protective oils and alters its pH level. Although Whitlock appreciated gaining an extra 15 minutes a day from soap-dodging, his primary motivation was to encourage friendly microbes to live on him in symbiotic harmony. …

Sarah Ballantyne, a medical biophysicist turned author and lifestyle guru known as the Paleo Mom, has been an advocate of living in a more “stone age” way since reaching a healthy weight after adopting the Paleo diet. She, too, uses only water to wash, even though she is “at the gym sweating buckets six hours a week”. “I use coconut oil to shave and that’s it,” she says. “Over time, my skin has adjusted. I don’t smell.” She is working on a book about the human microbiome and is convinced her odour-free armpits are a sign that her skin microbiome is healthy.

Jackie Hong, a reporter in Yukon, north-west Canada, has eschewed soap in the shower for nine years. “I use my hands to scrub myself and get any grime off.” … She was curious to go without soap after an artist told her that he hadn’t lathered up in 20 years. She says she saves time and money and needs “a lot less body lotion”.

“There’s nothing wrong with just rinsing,” says Sandy Skotnicki, a Toronto-based dermatologist and the author of the 2018 book Beyond Soap. “I’ve talked to people who haven’t used any kind of detergent in years and they’re perfectly fine.” …

Spending time outdoors, and “forest bathing” in particular, has also been shown to be beneficial to the microbiome.

And with this, the Fall of Civilization continues to be way ahead of schedule. If we maintain our present pace, in a year or two we should be right back to the Dark Ages.

Look, I’m a big believer that we have become way too sanitary. Our kids live off Purell and the thought of drinking tap water is so alien to them and they spend so much time in the safety of mom’s Himalayan Pink Salt air-purified indoors that they have no resistance to anything. And so things like the humble, noble peanut are now treated in schools like the Communist Red Menace was back in the 1950s.

I’m not going to stray into the territory of your uncle’s Facebook posts about how he ate mudpies and drank out of the garden hose and his mom smoked when he was in the amniotic sac and he turned out just fine. But I am a big proponent of the 5-Second Rule, which is why I’ll eat something I dropped on the floor and never get sick. We need some germs or else we can’t survive. Back a few hundred years ago in Europe, it wasn’t the farm workers getting hayfever or the peasants getting hemophilia; it was the aristocracy. I’ve got a buddy who’s a chemist who wrote a patent for a process to safely give people worms in their digestive system because it’s natural and healthy.

That said, this business of not using soap is a fresh hell that has to be stopped and it has to be stopped now. “I don’t smell” and “forest bathing” are the last refuge of the filthy and lazy. First of all, no one who ever had debilitating body odor ever admitted to smelling bad. I used to have a janitor in my office who weighed 400 lbs if he was an ounce. A nice man with a heart of gold (that is, before his crippling diabetes stopped it cold) whom you could tell had been in a room 10 minutes after he left it from the combination of sweat, dirty ass and old food that permeated him. I overheard his supervisor trying to explain the problem to him in the politest possible way and he couldn’t believe there was an issue. Even while acknowledging his arms weren’t long enough to properly wipe his ass. I believe the proper term for it is denial. But B.O. does nicely too.

If David Whitlock and Sarah Ballantyne and Jackie Hong and Sandy Skotnicki want to self-identify as not needing soap to keep from stinking, that’s their business. But their right to stank ends where my and your nose begins. Let them spend an hour or so among other people who don’t use soap. Ride a NYC subway on a hot day during rush hour. Take a leisurely stroll through a San Francisco homeless camp. Then report back to us how all that “stone age” rinsing, Paleo lifestyle, “sweating buckets” and “forest bathing” is working there. It might be swell for the microbiome, but tell it to the poor son of a bitch wage-slaving it in the next cubicle when you’re nine years into “eschewing soap.” Never mind any hapless soul unfortunate enough to climb into the same bed as you.

Now if you’ll excuse me, after reading about these disgusting, filthy hippies, I need a long, hot shower.