I am happy to report that there is a nascent backlash against the daily shower. Glee star Naya Rivera said earlier this year that “showering more than once a day or every day is such a white people thing.” Rivera, who is black and Puerto Rican, then apologized. Why? You were right, Naya. You could be the face of a humanitarian campaign. You could change lives.
Several months after Rivera-gate, a writer for New York magazine went a whole month without showering more than once a week. “No one seemed to think I stunk,” she wrote, “not even my boyfriend. On the Friday of the second week, I Gchatted him to ask how he honestly felt about the way I was looking and smelling. He hadn’t even realized that the experiment had started.”
There are even potential health benefits to showering less. “Researchers have discovered that just as the gut contains good bacteria that help it run more efficiently, so does our skin brim with beneficial germs that we might not want to wash down the drain,” noted The New York Times back in 2010. The article also pointed out that daily showering dries out the skin, potentially leading to eczema.
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