Phenomenal: stop washing your skin with soap

I live off grid,no electricity no plumbing.so I have been washing my "strategic places" with a washcloth and a bucket of warm water. First I used soap,but rinsing it was difficult so I started to rub vigorously with just water.

That was the start of an intriguing journey. I found that after ditching the soap my armpits stopped smelling even after a sweaty day of work! When I went to a swimming pool and duly soaped myself, any sweaty work would result in a disagreeable armpit smell.

I consulted a dermatologist, and he said that our skin tries to find a balance in microbes, but we constantly mess with it by eliminating some. So the baddiers get an advantage and overgrow. Instead of stopping the interference, we then add deodorants, which further mess with the balance.

Now I have stopped using soap to wash myself. I no longer need a deodorant, and believe me, I do not smell bad 😄. My skin feels better because I no longer strip it of oils.

Just ask yourself: who don't animals in the wild use soap? if it was so necessary, all furry animals would be busy showering!

Yesss! I stopped using soap and shampoo because of allergies. To my surprise, after an adjustment time, 2-3 weeks with only water and only the “stinky bits” washed with plain water, pit oder was gone. There is a gentle light scent, which I assume is just “me”. I can hand rinse shirt pit areas with plain water and wear them repeatedly. I do have to hand squeeze the water thru the shirt pit a couple times but do not have to rinse the whole garment. This includes activities like hauling heavy bags & digging by hand on 90f days. Way cuts down water use and laundry time. I do occasionally run a “quick rinse” load in cold water in the wash machine, like when I’ve been dusty work, but not often. The scalp oil took longer to balance but now I’m much happier with my skin and hair. Bonus, no more dry skin, no more expensive lotions.

Agreed! I'm grateful for the allergies that stopped me using all my usual skin and hair care about 8 years ago!

I use only water and a washcloth to wash my face and body with, part from diluted castille soap if my hands are dirty with oil. The only time I get even slightly stinky is if I'm badly stressed, and even then not always.

I know I'm not kidding myself because my super-fussy hygiene-focused hubby would soon tell me if I smelled!

OK, I thought this was nonsense.
So to prove that if I stop using soap on my armpits, I will get more stinky not less.
I stopped using soap on my armpits. And use no deodorant.

And now they don't stink anymore. They actually smell kind of nice.

I will continue this experiment and if anything changes in my confused little world I'll post back.

 I don't know what's real anymore.

It's amazing, isn't it?!

I think the reason people smelled before the hygiene obsession became big business wasn't so much because they didn't wash themselves but because they couldn't wash their clothes or bedding.

I did the same.  I've also stopped showering more than once or, rarely, twice a week.  The only place I use soap is on my hands because they won't get clean with only water.

I haven't dared to stop using soap on my stinky crevices and shampoo on my hair, but I found since childhood that if I use soap on my face I'll get acne 2 or 3 days later. It was true when I was teenager, and even now in my fifties if I use soap on my face, I'll get a pimple 2 or 3 days later. I've always just used warm water on my face, splashing several times until my face feels clean, and then rubbing with the cotton towel if some areas feel greasy, like alongside my nose.

Hey, and toothpaste doesn't add much to the teeth-cleaning routine. Most of your teeth cleaning is performed by the scrubbing action of the toothbrush. So you can dispense with toothpaste if you want to.

Personal hygiene before safe drinkingwater and when soap (as in bar soap) was taxed didn´t depend on soapy water. For hair there was a fine toothed comb (the UK famous penny combs actually, because all social classes used them) and a rubbing cloth/washcloth you rubbed over yourself quite vigerously and better after some excercise since sweat helped move the smells onto the cloth. Now note that also they kept linnen i.e. natural fibre against the skin and those where washed as often as possible.
Search for Ruth Goodman on more about personal hygiene and such before our modern systems. She also wrote a book on tudor and victorian daily life with a chapter on washing and such.
Toothpaste in modern times with the bad for teeth stuff in it like sugar and alcohol makes little sense, but brush with something they did. Soot from a beeswax candle against clean glass for one works to standards that her dentist was happy with. The soot acts as an abrasive, brushing alone doesn't do enough of that. An abrasive needs to be mild an very fine to do the job without damage soot fits that description.

Diet has a lot to do with the way that people smell, both at an individual level and at a population level.
Health too; a lot of illnesses cause bad body odor.

Also, the people you encounter that smell the worst are often in filthy clothes. Clothes carry odors and filth more than the body itself.

I quit using any sort of deodorant/anti-perspirant a LONG time ago. So did my wife. We smell great.
We also eat extremely clean on our non-processed paleo/low carb diet.

The chemical scents in almost all cleaning and hygiene products today sicken us. We can't stand them anymore. Once you re-set your sense of smell by avoiding those things, you realize how bad they are.

I consulted with my ducks. They tell me that I should not use soap. However, they also insist that's it's not a bath unless you seriously agitate the water and splash it high into the air.



Seriously, so many of the ducks were doing this in the creek, that my friend and his enormous camera, had to get in on the fun. Two of the Muscovy girls decided at one point to have an argument in the creek. Normally, I try to intervene if birds are fighting, but I decided I'd rather have my shower in the house and just waited in the hope they'd quit before I was forced to intervene.

Animals seem to manage fine without soap, so I figure I'm an animal and try to restrict my use to the minimum.