How Often Should we Shower?

In developing countries, there are still many people going to the stream to fetch water before they can make use of it for their household chores such as cooking, cleaning and bathing babies while the adults go to the river for their bath, this is a different story in developed world where every home has an inbuilt shower that releases hot and cold water at the same time, most of these showers are made of closed-circuit system (i.e water used from the showerhead has been designed for reuse again into the showerhead).

There is this cooling effect we all experienced when we have just had a shower which is revigorating, but the question is how often should we shower and what are the benefits/risks associated with it. 

I remembered when one of my friends in the UK was advised not to be bathing her little girl everyday but every fortnightly because she is having dry skin, I was curious until I came about this post which broadens my understanding.  

Obviously having a regular shower is good for our health and makes us clean but there are ways we go about this that may put our skin health at risk, some of us believe in scrubbing out every dead cells in the body and killing all the germs by using hot water and a large dose of soap. It has been discovered scientifically that using plain fragranced soap has no effect on skin-borne bacteria rather it disrupts the action of microcolonies of the skin flora and fauna, thus shifting them to the immediate environment such as the shower. The protective layer of the skin called stratum corneum is made up of dead skin cells, which act as a defense to our underlying healthy skin. The cells of the stratum corneum are bounded together with lipids (fatty compounds); these lipids help in keeping our skin moisturized by trapping moisture inside them (Just like when a cold butter is covering water from being released out).

When we have a very hot shower with soap and scrubbing sponge we adversely exposed our skin by eliminating the protective dead cell layers, leaving the delicate healthy layer susceptible to detriment (the soap and hot water with the scrubber dissolves off the lipids). The more bath we have the more we are exposing this outer layer and the more we are depriving the delicate layer of the natural oil our skin produces, by doing this on a regular basis we tend to create a dry, cracked and irritated skin. Also when we finished having our bath we used towel to clean our body which damages the cells more.

Advice: This is not a recommendation but an advice, it is good to air dry after bath but if we can’t wait, we can make use of soft towel to pat dry our body and moisturise immediately, although because we are different with different skin type this may not be for everyone. It’s also good to skip bath once in a while and when having a shower make sure you use mild soap with warm water but above all, maintain a healthy and clean skin and drink clean water regularly.

Thank you

 Healthlist