Why are you telling us?
I haven't used soap or shampoo in a year
11–20 of 38 posts
Re: I haven't used soap or shampoo in a year
#12My experience with going soap free at various times in my life is that it works a lot better for me if I'm not showering in hard water. In soft water (I've mostly lived places with naturally soft water), I can scrub my armpits a bit and they are scent free pretty quick. In hard water the stink doesn't seem to come off quite as easily.
Re: I haven't used soap or shampoo in a year
#13Ah, soap-dodgers. They remind me of people who say "you don't need to write unit tests". Also, hands too?
Re: I haven't used soap or shampoo in a year
#14There was another article of this sort too. I'm curious about how soap itself originated though. It's alright if someone somewhere had an 'aha' moment and started using soap for hygeine, but for practically the whole world to use it, something interesting must've been happening?
I grew up on a farm. A pig farm. Between getting home from school and eating dinner, I had chores to do, in the pig barns. I usually came back from chores with pig shit all over my hands.
If I hadn't had soap to wash my hands before biting into my hamburger, I probably would have invented it.
Considering it wasn't that long ago (historically) that virtually all of the worlds population was agrarian, I suspect being dirty was a fairly strong motivation for the invention of soap.
Re: I haven't used soap or shampoo in a year
#15What about when he actually gets dirty? Some stuff doesn't come off your skin without soap.
use olive oil like the ancient Greeks and Romans?
Re: I haven't used soap or shampoo in a year
#16I wonder about brushing without toothpaste?
Quite a few people actively don't use toothpaste in the paleo community. Many use baking soda or something else like that. Not that I would advocate that, I'm just saying.
Re: I haven't used soap or shampoo in a year
#17I wonder about brushing without toothpaste?
Betcha that only works if you match an ancestral diet.
In my opinion, people give a little bit too much credit to living like our ancestors. A quick review of the historical facts show that we now live longer than we ever have [1]. I'm not saying this means everything we do today is better for us than what our ancestors did, but bathing is a matter of hygiene, and personal hygiene came along with the wonderful improvement we like to call indoor plumbing. I wouldn't dismiss its impact on our longevity out of hand.
Bathing regularly -- with soap -- has benefits, such as cleaning dirt from your skin better than plain water. Dirt; which is the home of such wonderful things as anthrax. I hate to use a scare tactic, but anthrax, as well as a host of other nasty vermin like MRSA, live in the soil. I know because my family owns a landscaping business, which means a lot of time spent in the dirt, and by consequence, knowledge of such infections. Bathing is good. Soap is good. Anti-bacterial-soap-with-ultra-lathering-action (tm) is probably a bit of an overkill, but I'm not convinced that it will be the end of our species.
On the topic of brushing your teeth and the ancestral diet, it's worth considering that our hunter/gatherer ancestors (Paleolithic) -- those who enjoyed the diet most frequently referred to as "ancestral" -- only lived to see 33 years of age on average. Without refined sugars and acidic soda, the primary danger to your teeth was biting down on a the hard pit of a fruit, or having them knocked out by prey that turned on you. Basically, you didn't need your teeth to last you 60+ years, so consider that before abandoning toothpaste on a naturalist kick.
I don't mean to be entirely dismissive, because I frequently question some of the practices we engage in daily, but the outcome of my questioning always involves the application of some common sense. Abandoning soap and toothpaste defies that principle.
1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Life_expectancy...
PS - Yes, I'm citing Wikipedia. It, in turn, has many citations for the fact I'm claiming.
Re: I haven't used soap or shampoo in a year
#18I have to say that I did try this for about 2 weeks (just under, 12 days, I think) and I don't know if it is just me or not, but there is no way I could get away with it.
My hair got really, REALLY greasy. I have very oily hair and it just got unmanageable. My wife complained about it on day 2. It didn't stop further into the experiment.
My skin, which is also very oily, just never felt clean and I looked like I needed to scrub good and hard.
Odor...well, lets just say that when I worked out I smelled something awful. It "went away" when I showered, but as soon as I sweat later in the day at all I started to smell again.
Just my simple experiment. Nothing more.
Re: I haven't used soap or shampoo in a year
#19Depends on what you do for a living, or even what you do on occasion. There are days I come home and my hair is so grimy it's sticky, and my hands are black with grease, oil, and road grit. Water does not, I repeat does NOT even touch any of that.
Re: I haven't used soap or shampoo in a year
#20I've gone without shampoo for many months now, maybe a year. I keep my hair very short anyway, so it doesn't matter very much. It hadn't even occurred to me to try going without soap. I could probably see it working fine now that I think about it.
If you have traditional-man length hair, you don't need shampoo and you especially don't need conditioner. Hair grows about half an inch a month, and your hair can only get so fucked up in the course of six months, so if your hair is within three inches long root-to-tip, fuck it.