Comment by LilBytes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LilBytes | Hacker News Reader

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Generally. I shower when I notice I start to smell. I live in a subtropical climate in summer (40 degrees and above, 90% humidity), so daily showers in summer are a must.

Having grown up in the UK where I suspect showering when needed, and not as a daily rituaual. I believe this is common. I recall a study that mentioned Europeans in moderate or cold climates only shower a few times a week, I suspect this is the same in the UK... though of course after sports I definitely always shower, no one wants a sweaty rugby boy rolling around in bed covered in other people's grime.

I shower in Winter, Spring and Autumn when, well. When my underarms and crotch are... Clammy. There's really no way to put that delicately.

The number of people in Australia who religiously shower every day, shampoo every day, even when their body doesn't need it. I find quite strange.

As another comment added, I will never put my self in a position where anyone can smell my body odour but why shower so frequently if your body isn't telling you, "it's a bit dirty over here, I could do with a rinse?".

I briefly dated some one who was diagnosed with OCD. Things didn't work out for us because amongst other things her idea of cleanliness was a whole bunch of topical treatments for her face and body over the course of 30 minutes before bed. She'd apply this 'skin oil' that made her face glisten. And would later complain that her skin was breaking out in spots because 'something isn't working with her skin care'.

The idea that your skin can and will look after it's self without us interrupting it's balance, was foreign to her. To this day I still just clean my intimate parts and arm pits when I shower. And clean the other parts of my body when there's physical dirt there. Her situation just made me sad. Her fears and obsessive compulsions about what 'health and hygiene' should be, were targeted my unscrupulous companies deliberately selling products that she absolutely did not need.

While I do mostly agree with you, and think that there's generally no need to bathe on mostly-sedentary days in a mild climate, there is certainly an actual answer to your maybe-hypothetical question: "... I will never put my self in a position where anyone can smell my body odour but why shower so frequently if your body isn't telling you, "it's a bit dirty over here, I could do with a rinse?".

I can certainly attest that I've known lots of people who seem to be unaware that anyone can smell their body odour, and presumably can't smell it themselves. The keenness of the sense of smell seems to vary a lot more among people than other senses (except perhaps sight, but we use technology to normalize that).

So having known many people who are unaware that they smell, I certainly worry the same could be true of me - I have a decent sense of smell, but probably there are many people who would notice my body odor before I did.

People really shouldn't have more than one sedentary day per week. It's quite dangerous for long term health.

Sedentary is relative. If it's nice out, I could spend hours outside working on my plants, and really only need to wash off my arms at the end. I'm up and moving, but it's not enough to make me sweaty and gross. I would still refer to it as sedentary, because I didn't leave the house, and didn't engage in rigorous physical exercise, but it's not like I sat on the couch and ate chips all day.

The thing is with smell is, it's basically a highly complex, involved diff tool. If you're surrounded by the same smells constantly, you won't pick up the smells. The body odour you express becomes the status quo.

For me to be able to smell my own body odour, they'd have to be a point in time where I didn't have body odour. And if my BO is so wretched I don't need to put my nose into my arm pit to smell it (I challenge anyone to disagree with me that they don't do an arm pit sniff test to gauge their cleanliness) well, throw me into a fucking lake.

Of course, some people may have more delicate smells than most. Or not at all. I don't know where I sit. But I've got a 100% success rate in never being told 'my dude, you smell like an over ripe peach', so I think I'm doing OK. Or my friends are part of a dasteredly ruse to forever keep me single.

I don't sniff my armpits because they've never smelled in my life.

I have a genetic defect where I don't produce apocrine sweat (the kind that causes bacteria to produce odor) but still maintain the eccrine sweat that cools me down.

This trait is associated with dry earwax.

I've worn a shirt for a week straight and had a relative with a sensitive nose smell it and another shirt that had not been worn a day. They incorrectly guessed which shirt I had worn and which one I hadn't.

That's really interesting, thanks for sharing.

> As another comment added, I will never put my self in a position where anyone can smell my body odour but why shower so frequently if your body isn't telling you, "it's a bit dirty over here, I could do with a rinse?".

There is so much of our culture ingrained in this sentence that any conclusions we draw from it risk being warped. I don't know what's really going on but I put forward this theory:

1. We are probably supposed to put ourselves in positions where someone else can smell us. It's very, very, common in the animal kingdom.

2. Given 1 your body is probably not asking for a rinse. The message that your body is trying to convey might not be intended for you all.

3. Humans are intelligent enough to realize this and have the capability to alter the way they smell. This has led to an elaborate competition for social status based upon artificial fragrances.

4. Humans are intelligent enough to realize even this so from there it might very well be the case that your body is asking you for a rinse. But it's all meta at this point. ;-)

" I shower when I notice I start to smell. "

1) We adapt quickly to odours around us, you will always smell a whole lot worse to other people than you do to yourself. So maybe a ritual is better than a faulty detector.

2) The 'natural skin' thing is partly a myth. While a lot of products are snake oil, many are not. Women past a certain age (I suppose men as well) generally do not get 'amazing skin' without some kind of regime. Water, moisturizer and UV blockers are the base, but there is rationality to it all.

I made the move towards not so much shower reduction(a few times a week still, and stick deodorant) as soap reduction, because I realized that what is true of most surfaces is true of my skin and hair: it's not the soap that gets it clean but the scrubbing, and a little bit of scrub with a washcloth is going to be enough to get most of the actual gunk while preserving the microbiome. Soap is for when you actually need a harsher cleaning agent than water, which is going to happen only occasionally. Exposure to sunlight also does some natural cleansing, though not everyone is in a position to sunbathe.

And yes, for the first few weeks this did make things a little more smelly. Deodorant suffices to cover it.

I feel like I shower much more when I am not in the hot, humid, sweaty tropics. You're just gonna be covered in sweat again five minutes after going outside, why bother? Everyone smells a little sweaty. In colder places, nobody has any natural scent, and you stick out if you do.

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