I gave up soap and deodorant ... and became HEALTHIER

Are we too clean for our own good? To find out, one brave writer took part in this unique experiment. It could change YOUR habits, too

THE modern world is obsessed with personal hygiene. Like most people, I have showered every day of my adult life, lathering up with soap, then applying a generous slick of deodorant to keep myself fresh.

But what if all these products are actually doing us more harm than good?

It is known that soap and deodorant can strip the skin of its natural oils which act as a moisturiser. But scientists are increasingly saying that such products can also radically alter our ecosystem, the trillions of tiny organisms that live on and in us.

The average human body contains 37 trillion bacteria cells — around 370billion of them living directly on the skin — alongside just 30trillion human cells.

It is now thought that excessive washing affects that balance, and many scientists believe maintaining as natural an ecosystem as possible is a defence against such skin conditions as eczema and psoriasis.

‘Our preoccupation with cleanliness may not be a good idea,’ says Dr Adam Roberts, a senior lecturer in molecular microbiology at University College London. ‘More research needs to be done, but we have co-evolved with bacteria. We need them as much as they need us.’

To see what impact soap and deodorant have on skin bacteria, and what this might mean for health, I agreed to take part in an experiment: going without soap, antiperspirant or deodorant for four weeks.

For safety reasons, I was allowed to wash my hands with soap (important after food preparation). I could also shave (with shaving oil) and shampoo my hair — but otherwise, it was water only: no deodorant, no soap, no lotions.

To see how this ‘no-soap’ regimen affected my skin bacteria, I had to take weekly swabs from five sites on my body: the outside of my nose, the base of my spine, an armpit, my groin and in between my toes. These areas were chosen on the advice of experts because they are all meant to have distinct bacteria.

The samples were then analysed in a laboratory by IS-Diagnostics in Amsterdam.

And the results were fascinating. Perhaps not surprisingly, there was an explosion in bacterial growth — I not only had many more bacteria on my body overall, but more species, rising from 192 types to 234 by the end.

My BACTERIA became more diverse. As Dries Budding, a medical microbiologist at VU University in Amsterdam, who oversaw the research, explains: ‘Diversity is associated with resistance to invasion by other species — a very diverse microbiota [the community of micro-organisms sharing our body space] is less prone to infection.’

He adds that it is well established that, if you wash with soap, you are more susceptible to fungal infections such as athlete’s foot and eczema.

‘Rates of allergy and eczema have rocketed since the Seventies, and that may well be because we are so hygienic now. The body’s natural bacterial profile — how it is when it’s unaffected by soap — is, arguably, a defence against harmful pathogens.’

But I’m running ahead of myself. The fact is that four weeks without washing is a long time for someone who likes being squeaky clean. So what was it like? It started well, I thought. The first day coincided with the start of a new journalism job.

Keeping the experiment a secret, I took to changing my shirt two or three times a day and kept a pungent stash of Deep Heat under my desk to spray about and disguise my body odour when necessary. I also kept my jacket on.

All went well until day five, when my wife declared, not unkindly: ‘you smell quite sweet today.’ ‘Teddy bear sweet or fish sauce sweet?’ I asked her. The latter, she admitted.

My body odour did oscillate: one day I’d smell of shampoo, the next like a goat. I never quite smelt like me (although, thinking about it, that’s probably exactly how I smelt). Weather was a factor, as was stress.

If anything, exercise — as long as I showered with water afterwards — made me smell slightly better (toxins leaving the body, apparently) and I learnt to avoid garlic.

There were days when I felt very self-conscious, particularly on the Tube, and it was hard to relax. When you don’t wash, you feel grimy and shop-soiled. But by the end, I’d got used to it and so had my wife.

Colleagues have since assured me that they never suspected a thing, though one admitted she thought me rather odd — a man who kept changing his shirt, never removed his jacket, kept his arms clamped to his sides like a penguin and whose office reeked of menthol.

But after four weeks, my skin looked and felt great: clear and elastic, with no dry patches (I’m prone to these on my face). My wife thought I looked better, too.

And while you wouldn’t have wanted to burrow in my armpits — now sweetly brackish, rather than horrific — by the end I felt oddly liberated. No one backed away from me, as I’d feared they might. But why? Could the analysis of my swabs have the answer?

Reassuringly, at no point were any known disease-causing bugs found on my skin. In other words, lack of soap (hands aside) hadn’t put me at risk of terrible stomach bugs or other diseases.

And there were definitely benefits. The biggest change was in my armpits. Apart from Staphylococcus epidermidis, a usually harmless skin bacterium that Dr Budding says is impossible to get rid of entirely, I started out with very few bacteria here, because I’d been killing them with compounds in my deodorant.

But untreated, in the first two weeks my armpit bacteria increased by more than 40 per cent and became more diverse. Notably, the numbers of actinobacteria — responsible for body odour — soared, from zero to 55,000 by the end of week four.

Some species of actinobacteria feed on our sweat, and the result is a distinctive sweaty smell. So in theory, I should have smelt worse — but I smelt better, and my wife agreed.

‘Sometimes when people don’t wash, they say that their body odour gets worse initially, but then improves — it could be that you get used to the smell,’ says Dr Budding.

But something else might have been going on, for between weeks three and four, the overall bacterial profile in my armpit became pretty stable, suggesting the ecosystem there had returned to its natural, pre-cleansing, caveman state. So while my actinobacteria were high, the other bacteria were knocking them out. ‘We saw new species of bacteria appearing through the experiment, so it’s possible that some are digesting the smelly end product,’ suggests Dr Budding.

Another positive result of the return of my natural ecosystem, he says, is that ‘it’s likely to be beneficial for the skin in terms of protection from pathogens’.

Like my armpits, the ecosystem on my nose had largely stabilised by the end of the experiment.

One species that did appear to go up was Staphylococcus aureus, a usually harmless skin coloniser which one-third of us have in our nose. But it’s also the most common cause of wound infections and painful boils.

‘When people get recurrent boils, one treatment is to eliminate these bacteria from their nose,’ says Dr Budding. ‘But on the plus side, if you carry Staphylococcus aureus and it enters your bloodstream, the resulting infection is likely to be less severe.’

Another area that showed a dramatic change in the early part of the experiment was my groin, with the number of bacteroidetes — associated with the gut and usually passed out via stools — increasing more than tenfold by the end.

Although these bacteria can be good for us inside our gut, helping to break down certain starches into molecules that can be used for energy, ‘we don’t know if they perform any function when on the skin’, says Dr Budding.

‘But we do know they are not usually dangerous — they won’t make you sick. So avoiding washing in this area is unlikely to be bad for you, just smelly.’

WITH my back and toes, there was a lot of variation from week to week, rather than an overall stabilisation of the ecosystem. On my back, as well as the very common Staphylococcus epidermidis, the tests identified corynebacteria — ‘which sit in sebaceous glands, feeding off fatty substances secreted into the skin’, says Dr Budding.

These are the type that result in an unpleasant smell in the armpits. ‘But this won’t happen on the back because you have different sweat glands there, which don’t contain the molecules needed to produce the smell.’ There was also evidence of Propionibacterium acnes, bacteria thought to contribute to acne, and Stenotrophomonas maltophilia, which Dr Budding tells me is famously resistant to antibiotics.

The changeable environment of the feet — which are moist and in contact with many surfaces — left me with lots of different species at various times. These inlcuded lactobacilli acidophilus, found in the gut and commonly included in probiotic preparations aimed at improving gut health. It’s not clear what its role might be on the toes. Overall, the picture was healthy. ‘This trial shows that, if you don’t wash for a month, it won’t harm you,’ says Dr Budding. ‘After all, we lived like this for millions of years.

‘In fact, without soap, you can expect your skin tone and condition to improve because you’re not drying it out with products and your natural balance has been restored.’

Pointing to the rise in the number and type of bacteria on my body, Dr Roberts at University College London suggests that our obsession with cleanliness is to our detriment.

‘Looking at your results, a more complex ecosystem has emerged in the absence of soap and deodorant,’ he says.

Some experts even go so far as to argue that in an ideal world, we wouldn’t impede our natural bacterial populations with soaps and deodorants at all.

But while there is a primeval freedom to that idea, I can’t lie: I celebrated the month’s end with a blissful, hour-long glycolic soak.

However, now I no longer use antiperspirant, and a bottle of shower gel lasts me six months.

And my skin — more supple and less dry than it used to be — is undoubtedly better for it.