Social networks from time to time viralize a challenge or habit that for many people was not on their radar. The latest of these is a huge Gen Z self-care trend that has been dubbed “Everything Shower” or in Spanish as the “hygiene Olympics”. The concept is simple, since it focuses on transforming the shower into a mega-beauty ritual that includes exfoliation, hair removal, hair masks, deep cleansing and hydration with showers that last 50 minutes.
It’s going more. Under the premise of self-care and mental relaxation, this practice has gone viral as the definitive routine to “reboot” the weekend. However, if we put this trend through the scientific filter, the picture changes drastically. From both a public health and sustainability point of view, 50-minute showers are not a reward for your body, but rather a punishment.
A dermatological disaster. It may seem contradictory, but exposing the body to water for almost an hour does not hydrate and, in fact, does the opposite. Here the dermatological consensus suggests that prolonged exposure to water, especially if it is hot, and the continued use of surfactants in gels and shampoos, very negatively affects our skin barrier.
Why this damage is caused is well documented, since spending 50 minutes under the jet causes transepidermal water loss. By aggressively removing lipids and natural moisturizing factors from our skin, the outermost layer of our skin becomes dehydrated. But in addition, the excess of this wash alters the pH and destroys our skin microbiome, which are nothing more than bacteria that protect us.
Its consequences. With this dehydration of the skin, the only thing that is achieved is having a greater risk of xerosis, which is nothing more than having chronically dry skin, but also a feeling of tightness, peeling and itching. Without going any further, in people with sensitive skin or a tendency to atopic dermatitis, a ritual of this type is the perfect one-way ticket to a severe outbreak.
Three minutes. The experts they are clear that the ideal shower should be short, just between 3 and 5 minutes and always with warm and not boiling water. And they go one step further in terms of the use of soap, since they recommend soaping focused exclusively on the areas of greatest sweating, such as the armpits, groin or genitals.
In fact, they point out that, for most people, a daily shower with soap all over the body is not even strictly necessary to maintain good health.
It is not sustainable. If the impact it has on the skin is worrying, the environmental impact is simply a catastrophe. If we take out the calculator and take into account that a 10-minute shower has an average consumption of 200 liters of water, we can know that spending 50 minutes doing this hygiene ritual can cost 1,000 liters of water per person.
It is an exorbitant figure that clashes head-on with any policy to protect the scarce water resource, not to mention the enormous energy cost of heating that amount of water.
The referent. To put this waste in perspective, just look at the WHO guidelines through its WASH program, which establishes a shower of 5 minutes or less as a reference for sustainable hygiene. To give us an idea, the average daily consumption goal set by the organization to cover all the basic needs of a person is around 95 liters of water in total.
Images | Armin Rimoldi
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