a dirrrty story

By Todd Stadler · Wednesday, May 28, 2003 12:16am

Dear Diary, I'm sorry I haven't written in you lately, but I've been too busy ? too busy not bathing!

Okay, that's not entirely true. I just had to grab your attention after you fell asleep waiting (oh, I know how you hang on my every word, or lack thereof) for the next Cock-a-hoop entry. Let's back up.

The story begins, as most good stories do, in a barbershop.

No, I'm not going to retell the movie Barbershop. This is a different story.

There I was in my ur-hip barbershop getting a not-too-ur-hip haircut and thinking about how I was paying $20 for a haircut.

You see, back in the day (somewhat ironically, the "making far more as an engineer than I do now" day), I used to cut my own hair with clippers, mainly because it was cheap, quick, and easy.

Ironically this former buzzed hairstyle was recently derided as more "forced-hip" than the one I was about to recieve for $20 at a place that calls itself a "rock 'n' roll barbershop". O fickle hipness!

Anyhow, not only was I paying someone to cut my hair, but I was thinking I needed some kind of styling product to, um, make my hair look cool. And, of course, to make my rock 'n' roll career really take off.

The girl cutting my hair had no tips on the rock career, but she suggested I buy a $4 bottle of stuff to make my hair less, you know, stupid.

While explaining to me what this stuff does, she noted that it basically has the same effect on hair as not shampooing it for several days. This struck me as odd.

Here I was about to pay $4 for a rather small bottle of stuff that could be mimicked with a basic lack of hygiene.

Maybe it was my "cheap" aesthetic kicking in, but a revolution began right there in the barbershop.

Fast forward a couple of days. For reasons I couldn't even guess at, someone at work was passing around an article debating the merits of regular bathing with soap. Some people at my work are just like that.

I might have ignored it, had it not been for the aforementioned revolution that had been planted in my brain. You know how revolutions can be.

I thought about the fact that Europeans bathe less than Americans. I thought about the fact that Europeans seem to live fairly normal lives.

I thought about how, of all the bathroom grooming rituals Americans hold dear, only teeth-brushing and hand-washing had any medical value for most people.

I thought about the fact that soaps by nature strip oils from the skin and hair. I thought about the myriad products that are sold to fix the problems created by stripping away those oils, often by the companies that also sell the soaps.

And, of course, I thought about all the rock stars who were rather famous for being dirty and disheveled.

That is, you may observe, an awful lot of thinking.

The whole soap thing started to seem a little silly, and therefore worthy of a scientific investigation of sorts. Because, you know, that's what I do.

I decided to experiment on myself by not using shampoo or soap (except on my hands), and seeing what happened.

Oh, I know, the horror, the horror. You don't want to get e-mails from me anymore, dirty scuzzball that I've become.

Or maybe you haven't been using soap for years, and think I'm just a Johnny-come-lately to the world of unwashed hippies.

But, two months into my experiment (with only a few soapings in the intervening time), my overarching conclusion so far is that the body-cleansing industry is full of hooey.

Every day or two, I hop into the shower and waste as much water as the next guy, scrubbing and all that. I just don't use soap or shampoo.

My friends who are largely ignorant of my anti-surfactant ways, haven't raised much of a stink over this experiment, presumably because I haven't raised much of one, either.

My skin looks and feels the same. My hair may not have that clean, light look and feel that it does after a shampooing, but given that it didn't look like that with the aforementioned styling gunk in it (indeed, that's why I used the stuff in the first place), it's all the same.

That said, I don't believe the claims that some people make that after not using soap for some time, your body's "natural chemistry" kicks in and makes you not stink.

No, I continue to smell like broiled onions after a hard day of exercise, but more naturally so.

Of course, as with the soap-ful, the solution to stinkiness is to shower more frequently and minimize the smelly bacteria. But you still don't need soap.

I'd like to think that there is some paradigm-shifting conclusion to be made from all this. After all, when I began this whole experiment, it seemed so weird to use so little soap.

But no. It just turns out that one really doesn't need to use much soap to live a rather normal life.

So I save a few bucks a month or something.

Um, take that Proctor & Gamble?!