Until recently, I've had a normal shower roughly once a month over the last three years, and this seems to have been largely fine? I won't say I've been perfectly stink-free, but now, 90% of the time I can tell when I'm stinky, and it's easy to fix without a shower.
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Oil scraping is where you cover your body in a base oil + essential scenty oil combo of your choice, and then scraaape it off with a scrapey tool. This is real labor intensive, would be easier to do with two people, is pretty messy, but end results are INCREDIBLE.
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My skin was supple and extremely moisturized and smelled amazing. All the dirt and dead skin had been loosened and scraped off with the oil, and only incredible-smelling, glowing skin was underneath. Every inch of my body radiated delicious perfume.
But srsly, *super* messy.
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Dry brushing was another one; the idea to loosen top-dead skin and dirt without disrupting the biome. I got a rough brush and went to town. This, like most of the other techniques, worked but was kinda labor intensive and annoying and didn't exactly feel good.
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Water-only showering and soaking did pretty well actually, I think I wouldn't mind still doing this. The idea is to 'soak' off the dead skin and dirt, and rub yourself down with an exfoliating thing.
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My main issue with all of these is mostly just the labor; basically every method I tried took more time and literal muscle power than a regular damn shower. Also, doing it less frequently meant there was more dead skin to remove.
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Eventually the frequency I've settled on has been showering once every 1-2 weeks, same as my hair washing. I use a gentle body wash, but I try not to use any on my armpits, where the microbiome is most sensitive. I *do* exfoliate underarms hard with hot water.
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My general feel now is most people's showering/washing habits feel strange to me? Like for most people, showering every day is probably absolutely excessive and creates a physical dependency on showering more. Your body acclimates and then 'needs' it.
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On the other hand, I had a hard time getting a level of cleanliness that felt easy and good after around two weeks out, and so probably that's the upper limit for what your body can naturally maintain (with some variance for diff genes and diets).
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But not sweat! Tho I'm not super physically active, I do dance hard and am an excessive sweater (team hyperhidrosis unite), and the frequency with which I felt I needed to shower was mostly independent of my activity and sweat, tho I *did* spotclean my crevices more often.
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And - again I do risk more mockery here - there is a 'natural body scent' that I grew to really enjoy with less showering (including in ppl around me who also showered less). It's not roses and vanilla, but it smells human and good and full of personality and I like it a lot.
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Cassie, did you change your name? 🥰 A "hippie chic
" I lived with for awhile had a lot of the same results. She lived basically off grid, on collected rainwater & bathed sparingly bc of such except for when the stream was in runoff mode. Roses & patchouli was her scent.
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Can confirm. I stopped using scented deodorant about two years ago. Now I'm much harder to smell, but when people do smell me I get compliments, they think I'm using some kind of super mild scent. *insert deez nuts joke here*
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I use sweat lodge (Lakota version) with sage as a cleanser. I found lake swimming, fire smoke, sweat and sage kept me in my most balanced physical health. You are a micro biome… and super interesting.
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Diet plays a BIG role here too, I think. I certainly changed after cutting out meat and dairy. And I've heard similar from others.
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There are products to help with your skin microbiome now. I personally really like showering and workout a ton, so I prefer to shower every day, but I agree that standard soaps are generally disruptive and antibacterial soap is awful unless you have some issue. I use a soap that
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Honestly, your experiments are arguably less weird than mine.
Dandruff annoyed me for AGES.
Just this itchy, dry, oily back and forth where nothing really helped.
And THEN I stumbled across the fact that it's actually caused by a fungus on the skin.
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