Recommended Read: The Case for Not Using Soap
A look at a fascinating Esquire article on the anti-soap movement. The theory is you'll "just smell like a person." I have my doubts.
I came across this piece from Michael Sebastian at Esquire exploring the (to me, shocking) number of men who’ve just... stopped using soap.
The premise, popularized by physician and writer James Hamblin, is that your skin’s bacteria form a natural ecosystem. Constantly scrubbing it with detergent wrecks that balance. Give your body time, the theory goes, and it’ll recalibrate. You won’t smell like sandalwood or citrus, but you won’t reek, either—you’ll just "smell like a person."
I have to be honest, I’m not sure I buy the "you won’t smell" part. My brain just rebels against it. We’ve all known that guy—maybe in college or at a summer camp—who didn't use soap or deodorant, and he absolutely did not just "smell like a person." He smelled like a rotting onion. Maybe he just didn't push through the "oily, smelly beast" phase the article mentions, but my skepticism remains high. I just cannot see how I would possibly get off the bike everyday, drenched in sweat and simply rinse off... I have a feeling my wife wouldn't go for the whole smelly beast phase either.
Despite my doubts, it’s a genuinely thought-provoking read. It's always interesting to question the "why" behind something we do every single day without a second thought. Here are the passages that lay out the argument:
"At first, I was an oily, smelly beast,” Hamblin wrote. “But after a while … your ecosystem reaches a steady state and you stop smelling bad. I mean, you don’t smell like rosewater or Axe Body Spray, but you don’t smell like B.O., either. You just smell like a person.
“Because, evolutionarily, why would we be so disgusting that we need constant cleaning? And constant moisturizing and/or de-oiling?”
“When you shower aggressively, you obliterate the ecosystems,” Hamblin wrote in The Atlantic. The bacteria “repopulate quickly, but the species are out of balance and tend to favor the kinds of microbes that produce odor.”
Michael Sebastian
