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Comment by adunaway | Hacker News Reader

It seems like the loudest outcries are people afraid of others not washing their hands after using the toilet.

The article doesn't explicitly say anything about it, but I didn't get the impression that any of those people (even the ones that haven't showered in years) weren't washing their hands after going to the bathroom.

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I stopped using soap in the shower, and shampoo in my hair. My hair is much nicer, and my BO disappeared entirely (women have confirmed this). No one noticed I stopped using either.

I can only speak for myself, but I still use soap after using the washroom and when handling food.

There's pretty clear scientific evidence for the use of hand-washing in specific cases. I think most of the people trying the no-soap, no-shampoo thing are actually rather empirical and respectful of science.

I used to work on repairing old newspapers in an archives. I saw the old ad campaigns for soap. We originally started using soap due to marketing, not due to scientific studies.

At the time, people didn't bathe that much. Ads recommended bathing regularly with soap. This improved odour. People fell for a correlation and thought it was soap that was the cause. This knowledge "wash yourself with soap!" was handed down through successive generations.

This belief was strengthened due to a TEMPORARY increase in BO if you stop using soap, once started. Takes about 1-4 weeks before the body adjusts and you become LESS smelly than you were before. Few people would have tried going without soap that long, so naive empiricism backed up marketing and tradition.

In other words, our current "soap everywhere, every day!" habits were not formed due to empirical inquiry and scientific study.

Here's one of the soap ads. These ran between 1920-1950:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/y1yyuz0p6ybhby3/Soap%20Ad.jpg

How long is your hair? I have a LOT of shoulder-length hair and I'm just not sure if I can clean that amount of hair with just water and no soap.

Also, you say "no one noticed I stopped using [soap]", but then you talk about a temporary increase in BO which "takes 1-4 weeks before [..] you become less smelly".

Which one is it?

Did you stay indoors for the first month? Or did people just not comment on it maybe?

I tried the no shampoo thing some years ago (my hair was shorter), my then-girlfriend did in fact comment (after I tried it for at least a couple of weeks) that my hair was more greasy (it was definitely not "much nicer"). Got a bit of irritated scalp too. I didn't feel very clean either, as if I was just smearing the hair-grease onto the rest of my body in the shower.

I felt a bit of resistance typing the above things. Are we sure it's not just confirmation bias? Because I can imagine people this experiment, IF they have success, they will report "my hair is so much nicer", but guess what, who is going to report "Yeah so I stopped using soap and shampoo, and surprisingly, my hair got greasier and dirtier, and you know the weirdest thing? I kept this up for a period of time and it didn't get better!", because people will just respond "um yeah, so take a shower already".

I have no problems with the idea, really. And I did try it, because I wanted it to work (no soap? sure! saves me having to find one that smells okay), several times even. But my experience just hasn't been very good. That's my empirical inquiry.

Actually I still want it to work, so maybe you tell me what I did wrong?

> How long is your hair? I have a LOT of shoulder-length hair and I'm just not sure if I can clean that amount of hair with just water and no soap.

> I tried the no shampoo thing some years ago (my hair was shorter), my then-girlfriend did in fact comment (after I tried it for at least a couple of weeks) that my hair was more greasy (it was definitely not "much nicer"). Got a bit of irritated scalp too. I didn't feel very clean either, as if I was just smearing the hair-grease onto the rest of my body in the shower.

Most people find best results with still occasionally shampoo-ing, usually a couple of times a week. Doing daily shampoo will strip your hair of its own chemicals and oils which is damaging in the long run, but for a lot of folks not shampoo-ing at all can cause issues with dandruff or scalp irritation.

Yes, but doesn't everybody know you shouldn't shampoo your hair daily, no matter what it says on the bottle? I do it about 2-3 times a week.

BTW this thread is starting to feel like a Reddit discussion :) [and I don't mean anything bad about Reddit that way btw, just that it's kind of unusual to talk about haircare on HN :)]

When I say I had a temporary increase in BO, I mean I noticed mild BO after, say, 6 hours during the transition period, and I showered again.

Before trying this, it would take 12 hours to get that level of BO.

And currently, I basically never notice that level of BO during a 24 hour cycle. It just vanished.

Measurement was....smelling my armpit.

>And currently, I basically never notice that level of BO during a 24 hour cycle. It just vanished.

Are you sure you just didn't get used to it? I had a friend that got into this and while he thought he smelled fine... no one else concurred except other people also living the same way.

I had to keep repeating this in various posts in this thread, but: I've had plenty of spontaneous comments from lovers, who didn't know I didn't use soap.

So yes, pretty sure. Especially since I DIDN'T get used to it before I stopped using soap. I was familiar with the smell of BO. But now it just doesn't arrive.

I wonder if it is that BO is really gone or is it just that you don't notice it anymore.

Wash your hair with conditioner, not shampoo. See #5 and #6 here:

http://thecurlyhairproblems.tumblr.com/cgmethod

I had a friend who didn't use soap in the shower either. he bragged about not using soap. The problem was he smelled. I was his best friend, and became habituated the smell, but many times I was viciously informed by others he smelled.

There are stories about Steve Jobs being in a similar situation. He didn't believe he smelled due to his diet.

If I remember correctly, Steve Jobs didn't use soap in the shower because he didn't shower at the time.

More information than I thought I would ever give on HN, but I rarely use antibacterial soap on my entire body (I do shower daily). My wife finds it completely perplexing that I exhibit no body odor at most times, even when sweating heavily.

This might be even more information than you want to give but do you have any Asian ancestry? I too have minimal BO, to the point of frustration to my SO, and wonder if it is due to partial EA ancestry.

"East Asians have fewer such glands than Europeans and people of Sub-Saharan African descent, which decreases their susceptibility to body odor.[28][30] Individuals of Sub-Saharan African ancestry have the largest and most active apocrine glands.[31] Racial differences also exist in the cerumen glands: apocrine sweat glands which produce earwax.[3] East Asians have predominantly dry earwax, as opposed to sticky; the gene encoding for this is strongly linked to reduced body odor, whereas those with wet, sticky earwax (Europeans and Africans) are prone to more body odor.[32]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocrine_sweat_gland

Negative - about as white as it gets (mostly German, some Netherlander / Irish ancestry, with a small touch of Native American). It undoubtedly has a genetic component, but I have to wonder how much of this is due to not regularly using antibacterial soaps everywhere like many people do.

I've always wondered why earwax was called ear "wax". Certainly didn't seem like wax to me. This explains it.

Why would your SO be frustrated by minimal BO on your part?

"Why would your SO be frustrated by minimal BO on your part?"

Jealousy !

You don't need antibacterial soap to remove bacteria. Soap, as a surfactant, combined with mechanical rubbing against your skin will remove dead skin and bacteria.

Furthermore, to quote a microbiologist friend, an antibacterial soap that kill 99.9% of bacteria (assuming you take the percentage at face value) will just result in the remaining bacteria dividing until your skin has returned to stasis of the microorganisms living there in just a few hours.

Use a normal soap. Wash your hands. Don't freak out about it.

I've never bothered soaping my whole body - since I was a kid and my parents made me start bathing myself, I didn't really see the point. For a long time, I felt sort of guilty and dirty about it, but it honestly never seemed to make a difference. And I never really understood why everyone else thinks it's necessary to soap all over.

I think I've read about people doing this before, perhaps on Boing Boing. If I was going to do this, I think I would just use plain water and a un-soaped wash cloth.

Are what about anti-perperents or deodorants? Are you using them or skipping them as well?

This boingboing article from 2009 is what got me to quit using soap. http://boingboing.net/2009/12/31/body-washing-with-wa.html

And some guy wrote a follow-up a year later. http://boingboing.net/2011/01/04/i-havent-used-soap-i.html

I use those crystal deodorant stones. My usage of those goes way back, regular deodorants gave me allergic reactions.

Water + occasional baking soda and apple cider vinegar for my hair is what I use.

I swear by the crystal deodorant, but it was completely ineffective on my son. This may be due biome differences between the young and middle aged.

EDIT: I use normal soap and shampoo.

I also use one of those and never smell at all, but I also wash with soap. Perhaps it's the crystal, not the lack of soap that does the trick?

I've used the crystal for about ten years. Stopped soap three years ago. My smell improved after stopping soap.

I haven't used soap or shampoo in years. I occasionally mention it to people, and after their disbelief subsides, they always admit that they wouldn't have ever known it by smelling me. At the time I stopped using soap, I was having lots of skin problems, and I found that they eased significantly when I stopped using soap. My dandruff pretty much went away when I stopped using shampoo, which was a surprise.

I do still use deodorant.

What about exercise? I tried this, but I exercise 3-5 times a week and I go hard, so I sweat a lot. On the fourth day I was ok, except for my armpits, so I went back to showering.

Never had an issue with exercise or sweat. However, there was a 2-4 week transition where all BO was worse. Then things got better than they were before.

serious question how do you handle cleaning your nether region without soap? i can see not using soap everywhere else except down there. And does it follow that we should stop using laundry detergent to? Tooth paste? Toilet paper?

Because your diet contains a high amount (compared to early Homo Erectus) starches and sugars I strongly recommend you continue to brush your teeth, or don't. I care not. Same goes for toilet paper. These treatment serve very acute practical issues. Soap is simply not required and in the absence of it (on a daily basis) there are no side effects.

if you are in direct contact with known deadly bacterial agents such as staph, trig, sal, anth, giardia etc use soap. As these bacterial agents are rare out side of their known sources of infection; uncooked meats, reptiles, hospitals, etc.

Money making opportunity, biome mouth wash, populate your mouth with beneficial bacteria known to colonize the mouths of caveman.

I'm doing exactly like you described for 3 years, and the results are the same.

Northern Europeans didn't bathe regularly, it was seen as sinful. However there's records in medieval England that people washed their hands before and after meals back to the (iirc) 10th century.

Washroom hygiene is different than if you wash between your toes or not. No one on earth has died from Cholera of the pinky toe gap.

I think it's important to point out that 30% of men do not only not use soap, they don't wash at all. And with that, the point about people not using soap in the bathroom is lost. If people are that concerned, they should be and should have been concern about the epidemic amount of people simply not doing any form of cleansing, which is a completely different and much worse problem than simply not using soap.

This is why the rule of "wash your hands before you eat" is more crucial than "wash your hands after using the toilet" -- adhering to both rules is preferable, but only the first protects you from the people who don't follow them.

Source?

(I don't disbelieve you, I ask for putting it on Facebook. Friday. :-) )

Edit: Ah of course, the subject was washing hands after the toilet -- not "haven't showered in years" :-)

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/us/14hands.html

Even though bacteria that grow on skin may be beneficial, I assume hands need washing since they are more prone to act as interfaces for pathogens. E.g. handshaking, food handling is usually not done with other body parts, and may spread disease. When talking about skin, you pick up pathogens with your hands, and you pass them on. Not with your armpit, back, etc.

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