COMING CLEAN ON BEAUTY PRODUCTS
Doctor argues soaps and artificial ointments have very little to do with personal hygiene
Picture someone who gives up most bathing, showers and beauty products and you may conjure up an image of a person quite different from Dr. James Hamblin.
Hamblin, a lecturer in public health policy at Yale University, preventive medicine doctor and journalist for The Atlantic isn’t a wildly unkempt person. Pass him in the street and you’d see an urbane, clean person — yet the idea of artificial cleanliness has become his driving passion.
In a new book, Clean: The New Science of Skin, Hamblin argues that we’ve become slaves to big beauty, slathering ourselves in a witches’ brew of products that we don’t really need, don’t really do anything, and sometimes actively disturb the normal, natural cleaning process our bodies have devoted centuries of evolution to fine-tuning.
Hamblin believes that when we apply artificial ointments and lotions full of chemicals to our skin, we’re making it harder for the natural processes we’ve survived with for years to keep us clean.
Take, for instance, the Demodex mite, a microscopic creature, hundreds of which traipse over our skin every single day. Left alone, they feed off our skin, removing dead cells and acting as a natural exfoliant, rather than the microbeads we scrub into our faces. Other microbes and mites feast on our sebum, stopping our skin from becoming too oily.
And yet we scrub and shower and salve our skin. “They’re not hygiene practices,” Hamblin explains. “They’re recreational and social practices.”
That’s fine, he says, if people — and, by connection, society — acknowledge they don’t need to shower every day or scrub their face with microplastics to slough off dead skin.
“I don’t want to tell anyone they’re wrong,” Hamblin adds. “Some people really love beauty. If someone has the money and time, and really enjoys those cleansing rituals, that’s their right. But it’s nothing to do with health or preventing anything.”
Big beauty told us it was, and convinced us that we needed a cupboard full of products that would keep us pretty.
It’s worth US$500billion and though consumers say they plan on spending less as they spend less time socializing with others during the coronavirus, we’re still stocking up.
Not for Hamblin. Clean has its genesis in a 2016 article for The Atlantic for which he stopped showering. His body initially smelled — a hangover from his biome not having to cleanse itself because chemical deodorants did the legwork — but then began to sort out the smell itself.
Our skin regenerates about every 27 days, and dead cells disappear. If you’re worried about pollution harming your skin, soot and dust can be washed off by water, while body odour problems disappear once your body reaches a steady state.
Soap dries out the skin, making you dependent on moisturizers.
“We tend to be very susceptible to marketing and advertising that associates products and brands with health, when in fact many of us are spending time and money doing things that we could try doing without,” Hamblin says.
Since the 2016 experiment, he’s begun showering again, far less frequently and in a way that may seem unusual to the average person.
“I take short, quick showers that aren’t hot,” he explains, and uses nothing but water. “It gives me a rinse, makes my hair lay down, and makes me feel like there’s some divide between night and day in this pandemic time, especially.”
He also brushes his teeth — “I don’t want them to rot,” he points
We tend to be very susceptible to marketing and advertising that associates products and brands with health ... doing things that we could try doing without.
out — and uses hand soap.
“I wash my hands because I don’t want to have diseases,” he says. “I’m deliberate about why I’m doing what I’m doing.”
Things many of us have been doing unquestioningly may mean a step away from teeth-whitening kits.
“Teeth whitening is a great example,” he says. “It’s very much social, and about beauty. But it doesn’t actually have to do with hygiene, and it doesn’t mean your teeth aren’t free of bacteria and you don’t have an oral infection.”
But as with the rise and changing face of soap during the Industrial Revolution, the rise of kits to bleach the stains from our teeth intertwines health and beauty together.
In the book, Hamblin explains how the use of soap in the pre-industrial era was a social signifier. “There was great social value in knowing you weren’t part of the people living next to the open sewage piles that were in London and elsewhere,” he says. “You were part of the washed class because you could afford soap and water.”
The product was expensive, and it demonstrated you were a cut above the rest. But the Industrial Revolution changed that: now, soap could be made cheaply in bulk, and was available to most people to maintain their hygiene and safety.
Soapmakers then pivoted. They produced more expensive soaps, for luxury purposes. “Chemically, it was almost an identical product, but with two different consumer entry points and supposed additional value,” Hamblin says.
And they have continued today in the same vein: cheaper soaps lack the colouring and scent that more expensive ones have. We’re also bombarded with messages about added ingredients that transform the humble bar of soap into something luxe — and with that comes added cost.
Showers for Hamblin have started to serve a different purpose to most people: rather than being to keep clean, they signify the start of his day. “This is an odd time, and at times like this, it becomes important to do things that ground you,” he explains, saying certain rituals are important in keeping us grounded. “These markers are important to us to maintain the rhythms of how our minds and bodies are meant to function,” he says.