by Amir Hafizi

Pix credit: Africa
This is how I look like every morning of workday, though. Just handsomer. Wayy handsomer!

I have a problem. I don’t shower or bathe during weekends, usually, so when my sister picks me up for our weekly lunch, tea or movie, she would usually roll the windows of her car down and make these... noises.

 “Hrgpluck! Frluckhhrrerrr!”

It’s either her suppressing her gag reflex cause she wants to vomit, or because she swallowed a choking giraffe.

However, I discovered recently that daily showers are not really that healthy. In fact, surgical teams and patients are prohibited from showering immediately before entering the operation theatre. Read all about it here, in a series of CDC - that’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention for you who have never watched 24 - journals entitled 4th Decennial International Conference on Nosocomial and Healthcare-Associated Infections, Volume 7 amongst other things.

Apparently, showering does not get rid of bacteria from your body. It only moves it around either from your body to the environment, or from the environment - your moldy walls and deserted-sanatorium grade bathroom floors - to you.

What showers do is remove the lipids from your horny layer. Wait, don’t laugh. Let me explain.

The outermost layer of our skin is a surface made up of hardened, dead skin cells called the stratum corneum or horny layer. These dead cells are like an armour which protects the underlying healthy cells. The horny layer is held together by lipids - fatty stuff that maintain moisture in the skin.

Pix Credit: Just2Shutter
Would you sacrifice your lipids to shower with her?
Showering using soap will strip off the lipids, as soap works by bonding with both water and grease (through its hydrophobic and hydrophilic components) and washing them away. Without lipids, the dead cells are also stripped away, destroying the horny layer and making you less horny (haha!).

This could be damaging to your health and in a study on washing hands in nurses, Elaine Larson wrote, “The numbers of organisms spread from the hands of nurses who washed frequently with an antimicrobial soap actually increased after a period of time; this increase is associated with declining skin health.”

So in essence showering, especially with soap, will ensure that we lose our protective armour of dead skin cells and expose our skin - the body’s largest organ - to the polluted environment. And showering regularly means we do not allow our body to replenish the lipids and fortify our horny layer.

However, explaining all this does nothing to people I am in close contact with, other than hold their hands to their mouth or do some projectile vomiting.

So what, right? Maybe my sister is just reacting to pheromones from my body and as we are closely linked genetically, she would find my smell to be intolerable and disgusting, right? If I were to go to a woman with my man-funk they would jump all over me, correct?

Well, yes, and no. Body odour is caused by bacteria breaking down proteins in your sweat into acids. People who have diabetes, eat spicy (not hot) food, and certain medical conditions will cause odors, but usually it’s just the bacteria breaking down the protein in your sweat.

So what, right? Maybe my sister is just reacting to pheromones from my body and as we are closely linked genetically, she would find my smell to be intolerable and disgusting, right? If I were to go to a woman with my man-funk they would jump all over me, correct?

Well, yes, and no. Body odour is caused by bacteria breaking down proteins in your sweat into acids. People who have diabetes, eat spicy (not hot) food, and certain medical conditions will cause odors, but usually it’s just the bacteria breaking down the protein in your sweat.

As for pheromones, yes there are studies that point to certain smells in male sweat and the armpit as something that could arouse some women, or even rejig their menstrual cycle, perhaps none of the pheromones could reach the olfactory senses that are bombarded with your two-day fermented stink.

So, to be sociable, showering is still essential. You can use soft or gentle soap as it may be better than normal soap in killing bacteria. The best way to dry your body is air-drying or perhaps with dabs from the towel.

However, please note that you do not and should not shower all that often.