Want healthier, cleaner skin? The answer could be to stop showering

Picture someone who forswears most bathing, showers and beauty products and you may conjure up an image of a person quite different from James Hamblin. The lecturer in public health policy at Yale University, preventive medicine doctor and journalist for The Atlantic isn’t a wildly unkempt human being. Pass him in the street and you’d encounter an urbane, clean person – and yet that idea of artificial cleanliness has become his driving passion.

In a new book, Clean: The New Science of Skin, Hamblin argues that we’ve become slaves to big beauty, slathering ourselves in a witches’ brew of products that we don’t really need, and which don’t really do anything – and sometimes actively disturb the normal, natural cleaning process our bodies have devoted centuries of evolution to fine-tuning.

Hamblin believes that when we apply artificial ointments and lotions chock-full of chemicals to our skin, emerging areas of science say we’re making it harder for the natural processes we’ve survived with for years to keep us clean. Take, for instance, the Demodex mite, a microscopic creature, hundreds of which traipse over our skin every single day. Left alone the mites feed off our skin, removing dead cells and acting as a natural exfoliant, rather than the microbeads we scrub into our faces as part of our morning ritual. Other microbes and mites feast on our sebum, stopping our skin from becoming too oily.

And yet we scrub and shower and salve our skin. “They’re not hygiene practices,” he explains. “They’re recreational and social practices.” That’s fine, he says, if people – and by connection, society – acknowledge they don’t need to shower every day or scrub their face with microplastics to slough off dead skin. “I don’t want to tell anyone they’re wrong,” Hamblin adds. “Some people really love beauty. If someone has the money and time, and really enjoys those cleansing rituals, that’s their right. But it’s nothing to do with health or preventing anything.”

Big beauty told us it was, and convinced us that we needed to stock up a store cupboard-full of products that would keep us pretty. It’s a £28 billion industry in the UK, with new products lining pharmacy shelves and taking up entire floors of department stores with scented and tinted tins and tubes. Globally, it’s worth $500 billion, and though consumers say they plan on spending less as they spend less time socialising with others during the coronavirus, we’re still stocking up.

Not so Hamblin. Clean has its genesis in a 2016 article for The Atlantic where he stopped showering and found his body coped fine. His body initially smelled – a hangover from his biome not having to cleanse itself because chemical deodorants did the legwork – but then began to sort out the smell itself. Our skin regenerates approximately every 27 days, and dead cells disappear. If you’re worried about pollution in cities harming your skin, the soot and dust can be washed off by water, while body odour problems disappear once your body reaches a steady state. Using soap dries out the skin, making you dependent on moisturisers. “We tend to be very susceptible to marketing and advertising that associates products and brands with health, when in fact many of us are spending time and money doing things that we could try doing without.”

And while Hamblin explains in his book that many beauty products, including anti-ageing ones, are “laboratory tested”, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re scientifically proven to turn back time, or even freeze it.

Since the 2016 experiment, he’s begun showering again, though far less frequently than before and in a way that would likely seem unusual to the average Brit. “I take short, quick showers that aren’t hot,” he explains and uses nothing but water. “It gives me a rinse, makes my hair lay down, and makes me feel like there’s some divide between night and day in this pandemic time, especially.” He also brushes his teeth – “I don’t want them to rot,” he points out – and uses hand soap. “I wash my hands because I don’t want to have diseases,” he says. “I’m deliberate about why I’m doing what I’m doing, and I cut out the things I’ve just been doing unquestionably.”

Things many of us have been doing unquestionably may mean a step away from teeth whitening kits. “Teeth whitening is a great example,” he says. “It’s very much social, and about beauty. But it doesn’t actually have to do with hygiene, and it doesn’t mean your teeth aren’t free of bacteria and you don’t have an oral infection.” But as with the rise and changing face of soap during the Industrial Revolution, so the rise of kits to bleach the stains from our teeth mimics the past, intertwining health and beauty together inexorably.

In the book, Hamblin explains how the use of soap was a social signifier. “There was great social value in knowing you weren’t part of the people living next to the open sewage piles that were in London and elsewhere,” he says. “You were part of the washed class because you could afford soap and water.” The product was expensive, and it demonstrated that you were a cut above the rest. But the Industrial Revolution changed that: now, soap could be made cheaply en masse, and was available to most people to use as a way of maintaining their hygiene and safety.

Soap manufacturers then pivoted. “They needed a way to continue to sell that class of beauty,” says Hamblin. They produced more expensive soaps, only for luxury purposes. “Chemically it was almost an identical product, but with two different consumer entry points and supposed additional value.” And so they’ve continued today in the same vein: cheaper, bulk-buy soaps lack the colouring and scent that more expensive ones do. We’re also bombarded with messages about added ingredients that transform the humble bar of soap into something luxe – and with that comes added cost.

Showers for Hamblin have started to serve a different purpose to most people: rather than being to keep clean, they signify the start of his day. “This is an odd time, and at times like this, it becomes important to do things that ground you,” he explains. Whether it’s making your bed, eating at rigid meal times or dressing up for working from home, certain rituals are important in keeping us grounded. “These markers are important to us to maintain the rhythms of how our minds and bodies are meant to function,” he says.

Where he won’t compromise on cleanliness is in hand washing. ‘Hands, face, space’ may be the phrase of the moment, uttered by the prime minister every other breath, but the importance of soap and water isn’t lost on the doctor. It’s the one instance where he thinks the line between health and beauty is becoming more distinct – and it’s thanks to the coronavirus.

“The moment right now with the pandemic is very important,” he says. “Humans are starting to ask: ‘What is the necessary, important hygienic practice to prevent the spread of disease and what are we doing for all the other reasons?’” Hamblin believes that the book’s release comes at a good time because the public are more receptive to rethinking their beliefs. “Moments of crisis like this tend to have the effect of resetting people’s value systems,” he says. “Most people are probably insecure about their health, their financial status, their social systems. It’s moments like this where people take stock of what really matters.”