You may be seeing elaborate shower cleansing routines on social media: daily exfoliation, double cleansing, antibacterial soap, loads of scented body scrubs and shower oils.
“I’m kind of appalled by the shower routines,” said Dr. Olga Bunimovich, a practicing dermatologist and assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
The multistep processes that have inspired people to spend endless amounts of time sudsing up can harm your skin — and the environment. Dermatologists say it’s all mostly unnecessary.
“Your skin is a barrier,” said Dr. Nicole Negbenebor, a dermatologic surgeon at University of Iowa Health Care. “It’s one of the biggest barriers you have. It’s you in your natural elements. So you want to treat it right, and then sometimes there can be too much of a good thing.”
Using anti-microbial/bacterial soap is one of the worst things you can do for you skin. They kill all the microflora of your skin indiscriminately which leave it open colonization by other bacteria which are not beneficial or actively harmful.
It’s the same as using herbicide to kill dandelions in your garden and killing everything else along with the dandelions. Then a few months later you wake up to find that instead of those dandelions and other plants you got poison ivy growing now.
Personally I shower twice a year whether I need it or not.
Not much you can do to improve on that kind of perfection anyhow.
It’s also bad in general -the more antibiotics people use, the more quickly bacteria evolve to not be affected by antibiotics.