Why Go Soapless in the Shower?
There's a growing movement abroad to go Soapless in the shower.
This means wash your body without soap.
This means wash your hair without shampoo.
Look around you and maybe the people around you are going soapless in the shower like this.
Hi and welcome to the Les Perras podcast episode number 360 which is about going soapless in the shower.
Why are people going soapless in the shower?
Some people are going soapless to save the environment. They feel that using more soap than is necessary puts more soap into the environment… Specifically into the water system. This can pollute, rivers, lakes, and the ocean. They feel that soap is not necessary in the shower and they are able to get themselves clean and odor free without using soap so they don't wanna use it because it's not necessary and harms environment.
Another reason to go soapless is because soap is designed to remove oil. Your skin on the other hand is designed to produce oil. It produces oil as a safety feature to keep water out and to keep your skin moist at the same time. When you use soaps you're removing the natural oils of the skin which can damage the skin. This is related to my point about eczema below.
Soap also removes the bacteria on your skin. However, scientists found most of the bacteria living on your skin is benign. That means it's not harmful to you. And some of the bacteria is able to eat some of the residue on your skin which if they don't eat it, then bad bacteria will come and eat it and that could cause an infection for you. So a lot of this bacteria is a powerful friendly helper to keep you clean and safe from bad bacteria. If you use soap you're removing your helpers.
There's a growing number of studies about the relationship between eczema and soap use. One study is showing a link between using soap for babies and children and the development of eczema as they grow. There's a correlation between the two and stopping using soap can reduce the amount of eczema in society. Further, people who use soap and have eczema often find their eczema gets a lot better when they stop using soap. This leads us to believe there's a connection between eczema and soap although the exact connection hasn't been proven scientifically, you might find if you have eczema and you stop using soap, your skin will get a little bit better.
Hair care is another place where people are going soapless, and shampoo is essentially a kind of soap for your hair. Once again, it removes the oils from your hair. Then you go out and buy more expensive products to put unnatural oil onto your hair. You're making the companies rich but it's not good for your hair and you're wasting your money. In my case, I simply got my hair cut short. My hair is so short that using shampoo would be silly. It's very easy to keep clean and very easy to style so I save time as well as money and I have no stress about my hairstyle, or anything related to that. I don't think we should go 100% soap free. If you get oil on your hands from cooking or from repairing machines that have oil on them, soap is just about the only way to remove that oil. We need soap in certain circumstances, however, a lot of the companies have oversold soap to us, and they've convinced us that we need it more and more all the time. They're appealing to our sense of cleanliness. And they have even associated it with morality or social acceptance which we are highly sensitive to. These are false connections and we can keep ourselves clean and nice smelling without spending oodles of money on soaps. Be nice the environment and be nice to your body and Think about cutting back on your soap use. thanks for listening.