si dawson

For Jan­u­ary I tried an exper­i­ment. No soap when wash­ing myself.

Here are my results & thoughts:

1. The first week or so is the worst. My body was obvi­ously flush­ing some­thing out. I don't know what, but it smelt pretty bad. I had a lot of show­ers per day.
2. The first cou­ple of weeks I also got quite a few blocked pores, but they went away too.
3. Even with a very active lifestyle, it's actu­ally quite man­age­able. I started by using no deoder­ant (I wanted to know what was going on), but ended up using an eau de toi­lette under my arms. There wasn't a strong neg­a­tive smell, I just pre­ferred it to myself. Oh, I hate my body smell, quelle hor­ror. Not really, just a minor preference.
4. Inter­est­ingly, my (very slight) eczema flared up a bit when my body was detox­ing, ini­tially, then calmed right down, went away & hasn't come back at all.
5. When I get out of the shower I'm actu­ally drier. As with the toxin flush­ing, I sus­pect that even using a very light soap & rins­ing well leaves enough of a film that a) tox­ins can't nat­u­rally flush & b) water gets trapped on the sur­face rather than nat­u­rally being absorbed
6. I've also stopped using sham­poo. Hair feels fine. There's a lit­tle grease when I run my hand through my hair, but I fig­ure that's just healthy nat­ural oils. It's cer­tainly never been too oily, not like when I was using sham­poo. My scalp is great.
7. It's really easy to be lazy & just stand under the shower, but it's impor­tant to rub your hands over your body, same as if you're using soap — par­tic­u­larly on high sweat areas — thighs, chest, armpits, back.
8. Ears. Ears are weird. In ears & behind ears? Couldn't keep those clean with­out soap. I don't think I have par­tic­u­larly dirty ears (unless they're run­ning off while I'm asleep), I sus­pect it's just a func­tion of the way ears are (you know, waxy & all)

pic by jciv

By the end of the month, I'd set­tled on using soap in the fol­low­ing circumstances:

1. Before prepar­ing food (duh)
2. After bath­room (see? not a com­plete philistine)
3. To wash extreme amounts of grease/grime/etc off my hands, or, for exam­ple, after vig­or­ously rub­bing my scalp to keep my hair/scalp clean
4. In high sweat areas if there was strong smell or I felt com­pelled to (after super heavy exer­cise) — so, that'd be arse, groin, armpits, oh, & the ever mag­i­cal ear. Even then, I'm using the light­est amounts pos­si­ble, and very rarely, maybe once a week

Given that my skin is my largest organ (ooerr), & obvi­ously there was some­thing unhealthy being blocked by using soap, I'm very happy to con­tinue with the above plan. That pretty much works for me.

Oh, & for bub­ble baths? All rules are off :)

[ear­lier post: The No Soap Exper­i­ment]