A dermatologist weighs in on the latest celebrity trend.
Not Bathing Is So Hot Right Now—But Is It Really Better for Your Skin?
I am a person who tends to shower daily—both for my psyche and for my fine hair that devolves into greasiness when not shampooed. Ditto my children, who get nebulously sticky during the course of a day and who, before they wore masks to school or camp, routinely transmitted their seasonal colds to me. Since they were babies, I found something so satisfying about a freshly clean, towel-wrapped child. However, a growing number of celebrities seem to disagree.
It began with Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis saying recently on Dax Shepard and Monica Padman’s Armchair Expert podcast that they seldom bathe themselves or their four- and six-year-old kids. “If you can see the dirt on them, clean them. Otherwise, there’s no point,” Kutcher opined, adding that he personally soaps up “my armpits and my crotch daily and nothing else ever.” Kunis cleanses her face twice daily but said: “I don’t wash my body with soap every day.” Shepard and wife Kristen Bell bolstered the anti-bathing mini movement last week on The View, saying they frequently forget to bathe their six- and eight-year-old daughters. “I’m a big fan of waiting for the stink,” Bell said. “Once you catch a whiff, that’s biology’s way of letting you know you need to clean it up.”
If three’s a celebrity trend, Jake Gyllenhaal completed the trifecta. “More and more I find bathing to be less necessary,” he divulged to Vanity Fair last week. “I do also think that there’s a whole world of not bathing that is also really helpful for skin maintenance, and we naturally clean ourselves.”
These tales of celebrity hygiene (or lack thereof) are ripe for discussion. But stars have been scantly soaping for years now: Brad Pitt has confessed to merely swiping his armpits with baby wipes. Robert Pattinson once shrugged: “I don’t really see the point in washing your hair.” For the past 14 years, if my daily rinses run too long, my thoughts turn to Jennifer Aniston, who revealed in 2007 that she takes three-minute showers—toothbrushing included!—to save water. (The fact that she showers at all suddenly makes her seem like a renegade.)
Now celebrities—the tiny yet influential sector of the population who popularized juice cleanses and jade eggs—are touting the skin-care benefits of not washing. “You should not be getting rid of all the natural oil on your skin with a bar of soap every day,” Shepard argued. “It’s insane.” Or, as Gyllenhaal described his strategic non-showering: “helpful for skin maintenance.” I was admittedly skeptical until Mary L. Stevenson, an associate professor of dermatology at NYU Langone Medical Center, told me that the celebs are...not wrong.
This story originally appeared on: Vogue - Author:Michelle Ruiz
