Once upon a simpler time, a shower meant soap, water, and getting out before your sibling started banging on the bathroom door.
Today, apparently, you are a barbarian unless you follow a 10-step ritual involving scented scrubs, antibacterial potions, double cleansers, three kinds of oils, and something called ‘hydration locking,’ which sounds less like hygiene and more like airport security.
Privates, folds, and the rest of us
Dermatologists now plead with us to stop behaving as if we are preparing our skin for a moon mission. ‘You don’t need to soap your entire body,’ they say in an AP report. Imagine that – after millennia of human evolution, all we really had to wash were our ‘privates and folds’. Everything else? Optional.
Exfoliation: sandpaper for the soul
And those videos where influencers exfoliate daily with volcanic ash scrubs? Sure, because nothing says healthy skin like sanding yourself down like an old teak chair. Experts recommend doing it sparingly, but why listen to them when someone with three million followers is swirling coffee grounds on their knees and calling it ‘glow therapy’?
Lukewarm showers and other joyless advice
The same ‘experts’ insist lukewarm showers are ideal. Yes, because everyone dreams of stepping into the bathroom to simulate standing under a dying monsoon cloud. They also say oils are not moisturisers, merely ‘sealants’. Terrific. So, after your 12-minute session in this water-conservation era, you can spend another five minutes rubbing in a substance that does not actually hydrate you, but at least seals the dryness in.
Water conservation vs influencer content
Meanwhile, entire states face droughts, yet Instagram insists your shower must be long enough to include cleansing, scrubbing, shaving, moisturising, oiling, affirmations, and possibly a stand-up comedy set.
Shopping-trolley science my way
Honestly, who decided we need professors to teach us how to bathe? Our parents already ran practical tutorials decades ago – complete with buckets, soap that slipped away, and no talk of glycolic acid. Somehow, we survived childhood with Lifebuoy and without ‘skin barrier’ lectures.
So yes, I will continue to shower the way I learned: quick, practical, and with whatever soap I happened to toss into my trolley. And if that horrifies social media, they can take a long, lukewarm bath and think about their own choices.
