Let’s talk about your filth.
Some people see showers as a necessary (and lovely) ritual that all decent human beings do daily...
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While others believe it's a chore to avoid until the last possible minute and then do as quickly as humanly possible.
If you're in this category and have ever wondered how often you actually need to clean your body, the answer is: not as often as most Americans probably think.
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Two dermatologists tell BuzzFeed Life that most Americans shower way more than is necessary.
According to Dr. Joshua Zeichner, assistant professor of dermatology at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, how frequently we shower and what we perceive as body odor is "really more of a cultural phenomenon." Boston dermatologist Dr. Ranella Hirsch echoes this sentiment. "We overbathe in this country and that's really important to realize," she says. "A lot of the reason we do it is because of societal norms."
And those norms are mainly the result of good advertising.
After the Civil War, both advertising and "toilet soap" (i.e., soap for the body) became more prevalent in the United States, says Katherine Ashenburg, author of The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History. "Americans turned out to be much more gullible and susceptible to these things than Europeans," Ashenburg tells BuzzFeed Life.
Then, in the 1920s and '30s, more women entered the workforce and more Americans left their farms to work closely together in factories, leading to another major cultural focus on cleanliness and bathing. This time, it came from business books like Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People and was mainly about success and attractiveness.
"Germ theory didn't matter half as much as promises of beauty," Ashenburg says.
