

I haven't used soap or shampoo in a year  - lladnar
http://www.boingboing.net/2011/01/05/i-havent-used-soap-i.html

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fingerprinter
I have to say that I did try this for about 2 weeks (just under, 12 days, I
think) and I don't know if it is just me or not, but there is no way I could
get away with it.

My hair got really, REALLY greasy. I have very oily hair and it just got
unmanageable. My wife complained about it on day 2. It didn't stop further
into the experiment.

My skin, which is also very oily, just never felt clean and I looked like I
needed to scrub good and hard.

Odor...well, lets just say that when I worked out I smelled something awful.
It "went away" when I showered, but as soon as I sweat later in the day at all
I started to smell again.

Just my simple experiment. Nothing more.

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naner
He added this in the comments:

 _Adjustment time is not immediate, when you stop using soap/shampoo shit goes
crazy for a few weeks, too me over a month to balance out. After that it was
amazing. If you stop expect things to be really weird for a few weeks, then
they level out._

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abas
My experience with going soap free at various times in my life is that it
works a lot better for me if I'm not showering in hard water. In soft water
(I've mostly lived places with naturally soft water), I can scrub my armpits a
bit and they are scent free pretty quick. In hard water the stink doesn't seem
to come off quite as easily.

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philwelch
Wherever I've had soft water, I've felt a lot cleaner even with soap. The
difference between soaps is nothing compared to the difference between hard
and soft water.

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midnightmonster
I've gone without shampoo for many months now, maybe a year. I keep my hair
very short anyway, so it doesn't matter very much. It hadn't even occurred to
me to try going without soap. I could probably see it working fine now that I
think about it.

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philwelch
If you have traditional-man length hair, you don't need shampoo and you
especially don't need conditioner. Hair grows about half an inch a month, and
your hair can only get so fucked up in the course of six months, so if your
hair is within three inches long root-to-tip, fuck it.

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tejaswiy
There was another article of this sort too. I'm curious about how soap itself
originated though. It's alright if someone somewhere had an 'aha' moment and
started using soap for hygeine, but for practically the whole world to use it,
something interesting must've been happening?

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dboyd
I grew up on a farm. A pig farm. Between getting home from school and eating
dinner, I had chores to do, in the pig barns. I usually came back from chores
with pig shit all over my hands.

If I hadn't had soap to wash my hands before biting into my hamburger, I
probably would have invented it.

Considering it wasn't that long ago (historically) that virtually all of the
worlds population was agrarian, I suspect being dirty was a fairly strong
motivation for the invention of soap.

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julian37
In the comments he clarifies that he still washes his hands with soap.

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philwelch
What about when he actually gets dirty? Some stuff doesn't come off your skin
without soap.

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joe24pack
use olive oil like the ancient Greeks and Romans?

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bradleyland
Or just use a plain old, natural soap. Soap is nothing but an alkali fat
pressed in to a bar. If you can find natural soap without tons of fragrance
and anti-bacterial, it's not bad for you or your skin. Overuse or overly harsh
soaps are what kill your skin.

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adnam
Ah, soap-dodgers. They remind me of people who say "you don't need to write
unit tests". Also, hands too?

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puredemo
The no soap people still use soap on their hands, afaik. He mentions this in
the comments.

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sliverstorm
Depends on what you do for a living, or even what you do on occasion. There
are days I come home and my hair is so grimy it's sticky, and my hands are
black with grease, oil, and road grit. Water does not, I repeat does _NOT_
even touch any of that.

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naner
Right, oil and grease are hydrophobic. This is the purpose of soap. It acts as
an emulsifier, bridging the water and oil molecules together and allowing you
to wash off grease and oil (often trapping dirt) off of your skin.

Antibacterial soap also kills bacteria that can cause odors but most shower
soap/shampoo is not antibacterial.

So maybe we could get away with only using soap when we are actually dirty.

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rscott
Soap I can kind of understand, but I definitely can't see how no shampoo would
work for me. If you ever put any kind of product in your hair that seems out
of the question.

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juiceandjuice
I use soap on my nasty bits, and that's about it.

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frederickcook
I wonder about brushing without toothpaste?

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stavrianos
Betcha that only works if you match an ancestral diet.

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bradleyland
In my opinion, people give a little bit too much credit to living like our
ancestors. A quick review of the historical facts show that we now live longer
than we ever have [1]. I'm not saying this means everything we do today is
better for us than what our ancestors did, but bathing is a matter of hygiene,
and personal hygiene came along with the wonderful improvement we like to call
indoor plumbing. I wouldn't dismiss its impact on our longevity out of hand.

Bathing regularly -- with soap -- has benefits, such as cleaning dirt from
your skin better than plain water. Dirt; which is the home of such wonderful
things as anthrax. I hate to use a scare tactic, but anthrax, as well as a
host of other nasty vermin like MRSA, live in the soil. I know because my
family owns a landscaping business, which means a lot of time spent in the
dirt, and by consequence, knowledge of such infections. Bathing is good. Soap
is good. Anti-bacterial-soap-with-ultra-lathering-action (tm) is probably a
bit of an overkill, but I'm not convinced that it will be the end of our
species.

On the topic of brushing your teeth and the ancestral diet, it's worth
considering that our hunter/gatherer ancestors (Paleolithic) -- those who
enjoyed the diet most frequently referred to as "ancestral" -- only lived to
see 33 years of age on average. Without refined sugars and acidic soda, the
primary danger to your teeth was biting down on a the hard pit of a fruit, or
having them knocked out by prey that turned on you. Basically, you didn't need
your teeth to last you 60+ years, so consider that before abandoning
toothpaste on a naturalist kick.

I don't mean to be entirely dismissive, because I frequently question some of
the practices we engage in daily, but the outcome of my questioning always
involves the application of some common sense. Abandoning soap and toothpaste
defies that principle.

1 -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Life_expectancy...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Life_expectancy_variation_over_time)

PS - Yes, I'm citing Wikipedia. It, in turn, has many citations for the fact
I'm claiming.

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fingerprinter
"In my opinion, people give a little bit too much credit to living like our
ancestors. A quick review of the historical facts show that we now live longer
than we ever have [1]. I'm not saying this means everything we do today is
better for us than what our ancestors did, but bathing is a matter of hygiene,
and personal hygiene came along with the wonderful improvement we like to call
indoor plumbing. I wouldn't dismiss its impact on our longevity out of hand."

I'm not a huge fan of the life-expectancy argument. Goto any hospital or old
folks homes and see how many people are basically the walking-dead. There are
patients who basically died 20 years ago but can afford to be kept alive for
quite some time.

I'm not saying we should live like a caveman, rather just that I'm not a fan
of the life-expectancy argument b/c I think there are too many holes in it.

And remember, most people are not living longer b/c of things like diet, nor
did our paleo ancestors die b/c of diet. We are living longer b/c of medicine,
advances in science and other things....people died in the paleo era from
sprained ankles. We can't readily compare them.

It just isn't fruitful to compare the two eras b/c we can't control the
variables to make a valid conclusion. However, using common sense, modern
medical findings on diet, we can deduce that eating like our ancestor is
actually quite beneficial and coupled with our modern medicine we can get the
best of both worlds.

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bradleyland
Hey, we agree! :)

Notice I didn't say anything about diet. What I mentioned was hygiene. I also
agree that comparing paleo man to current day man is about as useful as
comparing the failure-modes a Model A Ford to a Toyota Prius. They operate in
entirely different environments.

The analysis of life-expectancy and quality-of-life gets far more interesting
when you move in to a period of more recent history, when humans stopped dying
of things like tripping over their rock pile and started congregating in
groups, dying of something they contracted from the pile of poo they left in
the gutter. All of the sudden we start seeing disease and infection becoming a
major player in bringing us to our end. In this case, something as simple as
soap can help extend our lives by drastically increasing the effectiveness of
bathing.

This is where we get in to some more "advanced" common sense. I don't think
the goal ought to be eradicating bacteria from our bodies. If you set out to
kill all the bacteria on your body, you will fail. It is simply impossible to
kill all the bacteria without killing your own cells. This means that any
remaining bacteria must have avoided an early demise either through resistance
to your agent of bacteria-death, or adapted some way to hide. In either case,
the bacteria is better equipped to survive the next round of cleansing, and
will happily go forth and replicate. The end result is a whole heard of
stronger bacteria. See also, MRSA.

Backing up, my point is that I'm right there with you. As silly as it is to
try to drag our entire paleo life in to the 21st century, I think it's foolish
to accept at face value the messages we're bombarded with by product marketing
on a daily basis. They want us scared of bacteria on our bodies so we'll buy
their new Super-ultra-cleansing-action-anti-bacterial soap instead of their
competitors Just-ultra-anti-bacterial soap. Accept that for what it is, but
don't write off soap altogether.

It's a game, and the winning strategy is to keep your head and as you said,
"get the best of both worlds."

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austinnobody
people who are doing this: do you use deodorant or anti-perspirant?

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ciupicri
By the way I've heard good things about kalinite, but I haven't tried it
myself.

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honza
Why are you telling us?

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ancornwell
I also use iSoap.

