I haven't used soap or shampoo in a year | Hacker News Reader

I haven't used soap or shampoo in a year

boingboing.net

30 pointslladnar37 comments

I 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.

He added this in the comments:

Adjustment time is not immediate, when you stop using soap/shampoo shit goes crazy for a few weeks, too me over a month to balance out. After that it was amazing. If you stop expect things to be really weird for a few weeks, then they level out.

My 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.

Wherever I've had soft water, I've felt a lot cleaner even with soap. The difference between soaps is nothing compared to the difference between hard and soft water.

I'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.

There 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.

In the comments he clarifies that he still washes his hands with soap.

People were generally pretty dirty back in the day... You're going to struggle to get grease/oil off you without something like soap. Remember high school science and learning to make soap, how it worked, etc?

I can imagine showering without soap (I already don't bother with shampoo) but you'd probably want to keep it around for washing your hands after cleaning the house, gardening, working on anything greasy+, etc.

+ cue jokes about hair without shampoo...

What 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?

Or just use a plain old, natural soap. Soap is nothing but an alkali fat pressed in to a bar. If you can find natural soap without tons of fragrance and anti-bacterial, it's not bad for you or your skin. Overuse or overly harsh soaps are what kill your skin.

Ah, soap-dodgers. They remind me of people who say "you don't need to write unit tests". Also, hands too?

The no soap people still use soap on their hands, afaik. He mentions this in the comments.

Depends 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.

Right, oil and grease are hydrophobic. This is the purpose of soap. It acts as an emulsifier, bridging the water and oil molecules together and allowing you to wash off grease and oil (often trapping dirt) off of your skin.

Antibacterial soap also kills bacteria that can cause odors but most shower soap/shampoo is not antibacterial.

So maybe we could get away with only using soap when we are actually dirty.

Soap I can kind of understand, but I definitely can't see how no shampoo would work for me. If you ever put any kind of product in your hair that seems out of the question.

I use soap on my nasty bits, and that's about it.

I 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.

"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."

I'm not a huge fan of the life-expectancy argument. Goto any hospital or old folks homes and see how many people are basically the walking-dead. There are patients who basically died 20 years ago but can afford to be kept alive for quite some time.

I'm not saying we should live like a caveman, rather just that I'm not a fan of the life-expectancy argument b/c I think there are too many holes in it.

And remember, most people are not living longer b/c of things like diet, nor did our paleo ancestors die b/c of diet. We are living longer b/c of medicine, advances in science and other things....people died in the paleo era from sprained ankles. We can't readily compare them.

It just isn't fruitful to compare the two eras b/c we can't control the variables to make a valid conclusion. However, using common sense, modern medical findings on diet, we can deduce that eating like our ancestor is actually quite beneficial and coupled with our modern medicine we can get the best of both worlds.

Hey, we agree! :)

Notice I didn't say anything about diet. What I mentioned was hygiene. I also agree that comparing paleo man to current day man is about as useful as comparing the failure-modes a Model A Ford to a Toyota Prius. They operate in entirely different environments.

The analysis of life-expectancy and quality-of-life gets far more interesting when you move in to a period of more recent history, when humans stopped dying of things like tripping over their rock pile and started congregating in groups, dying of something they contracted from the pile of poo they left in the gutter. All of the sudden we start seeing disease and infection becoming a major player in bringing us to our end. In this case, something as simple as soap can help extend our lives by drastically increasing the effectiveness of bathing.

This is where we get in to some more "advanced" common sense. I don't think the goal ought to be eradicating bacteria from our bodies. If you set out to kill all the bacteria on your body, you will fail. It is simply impossible to kill all the bacteria without killing your own cells. This means that any remaining bacteria must have avoided an early demise either through resistance to your agent of bacteria-death, or adapted some way to hide. In either case, the bacteria is better equipped to survive the next round of cleansing, and will happily go forth and replicate. The end result is a whole heard of stronger bacteria. See also, MRSA.

Backing up, my point is that I'm right there with you. As silly as it is to try to drag our entire paleo life in to the 21st century, I think it's foolish to accept at face value the messages we're bombarded with by product marketing on a daily basis. They want us scared of bacteria on our bodies so we'll buy their new Super-ultra-cleansing-action-anti-bacterial soap instead of their competitors Just-ultra-anti-bacterial soap. Accept that for what it is, but don't write off soap altogether.

It's a game, and the winning strategy is to keep your head and as you said, "get the best of both worlds."

Not sure why that would matter that much. Our ancestors experienced tooth decay too. Of course their adult teeth only had to last 20-25 years or so.

Not something I'd experiment with. Your teeth don't get dry, greasy, or smelly from cleaning too much and you only have one chance to properly take care of your teeth.

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.

I regularly brush without toothpaste. It works fine. The toothbrush tends to squeak a little when the teeth are clean. It might help that I'm vegetarian and have a pretty simple diet.

I'm not sure. I think it depends a lot on the diet. Here's a related article about that and the accompanying HN comments.

http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2009/03/reversing-toot... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=543293

I just use water and did it both when I was vegan and when I moved to a paleo diet. No noticeable change.

Traveling through India I saw many people using what I think are called neem sticks. I don't know much about the science or efficacy, but if you're curious, explore away.

Yep, I quit using toothpaste along with the soap and shampoo, works fine. I just use water and an electric brush, and occasional flossing.

people who are doing this: do you use deodorant or anti-perspirant?

Very infrequently here, hasn't been an issue.

By the way I've heard good things about kalinite, but I haven't tried it myself.

Why are you telling us?

I also use iSoap.

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