When did soap become a dirty word? In a range of recent books, podcasts, magazine articles and other dispatches from the health-hysterical front, the much-loved cleansing product has got many people foaming at the mouth.
With the publication of his book Clean: The New Science of Skin and the Beauty of Doing Less in 2020, Dr James Hamblin became the unscrubbed but fresh face of the anti-soap movement and had a lot of readers questioning their daily hygiene rituals. The preventive medicine specialist and Yale University lecturer did it with one simple but revolutionary act: he stopped washing himself in the interest of allowing a diverse and energetic skin microbiome to flourish.
For several years, his personal cleanliness routine was the basic minimum. These days, he confirms, he’s not quite so dogmatic. “It’s a minimalist routine, I guess. I would say I just use soap as needed, which to me is when you actually have things that cannot be removed with water alone.”
The result of his experiment? Nothing bad happened. He did not get sick. He did not develop an odour that repelled other humans. Unpleasant germs did not set up home and start new families in his body. But the lessons he learnt from the experience are still with him. In particular, he realised that many of us wash too much.
Dermatologists agree that overcleaning, which for many people is the minimum, can do damage to us in numerous ways. For the average person, says Manawatū dermatologist Dr Louise Reiche, showering “weekly or every second day would be absolutely fine. And it doesn’t have to be a long bath or shower. If you’re doing face, hands, armpits, groin and between your toes and then rinsing off, it doesn’t take long. And using warm water is better. Hot water takes the oils out of the skin.”
Auckland dermatologist Dr Diana Purvis agrees. “People do overwash. You generally don’t need a harsh cleanser for your skin. If you are going to use a cleanser, I’d suggest a soap-free one that is non-foaming and doesn’t strip the oils as much.”
Among other crimes, excessive washing has been identified as potentially damaging to the skin microbiome, the latest hot new organ. Although most people are familiar with the gut microbiome and the benefits of feeding it yoghurt and kombucha, the magic powers of the skin microbiome are less well known.
It is defined tidily at researchreview.co.nz as a “biologically active ecosystem in which diverse communities of microorganisms live in a variety of physiologically and topographically distinct sites. These microbial communities and their collective genome are known as the skin microbiome.”
In other words, trillions of bacteria, fungi and viruses don’t just live in you (gut microbiome), they also live on you (skin microbiome).
(Though, while internal application of pre- and probiotics via food is great for the gut microbiome, rubbing yoghurt on your outside won’t help the skin microbiome.)
The skin microbiome is very useful, says Reiche. “A widely diverse skin and gastrointestinal microbiome enhances resilience against infection, allergies, autoimmune disease, cancer, ageing and degenerative diseases. But having a reduced microbiome can leave us more susceptible to autoimmune disease, skin cancers, ageing and other degenerative diseases.”
So it’s well worth looking after and not messing up by overwashing with soap. If we do, says Reiche, “we are more prone to developing allergies and infections on the skin”.
That’s all fine “if you are using soap just to take dirt off or cleanse smell-prone areas and rinsing off daily … but if you’ve got excessive use, we do find that the microbiome changes”.
Palmerston North-based Reiche is no alarmist, however. She balances reports that the microbiome can be damaged by overwashing with the fact that it also repairs itself.
Dirt is good
The microbiome was all ready for its big moment in the pop-health spotlight when Covid hit and handwashing became a potential lifesaver. Hamblin notes his book, which advocates leaving the microbiome to do its job, came out just in time for the pandemic to have its impact. “Everyone was just, like, ‘Kill everything.’ Hand sanitiser sold out.”
Huia Iti, research and development director at Ecostore, confirms: “We sold a lot of soap during that time.”
The microbiome is one of the complex combination of factors that work together to make for good health. It can be good to get a bit grubby, says Reiche. “As you spend time in nature, you tend to pick up bacteria from the environment, and that makes us more resilient.”
Anti-soap advocates are particularly critical of the soap-moisturiser product cycle, in which soap dries out the skin, requiring the consumer to buy a moisturising lotion to make up for it. This happens only if you use commercial soaps containing certain ingredients – and they make up a lot of the soaps on the shelves.
Iti says it is possible to make cleansers that don’t dry out the skin, but it’s tricky. “The thing is coming up with a balance in the cleaning stage – whether you have a harsher cleanser at the start, or you’re looking at removing only as much as you need. It’s actually quite difficult to do across the different body types and the way we live our lives. We have a cleanser that has enough oomph to remove what you want to remove without actually stripping the oils back so your skin is really exposed.”
Immune effect
Not everyone has a choice about how much cleaning they will undergo. Newborns are particularly vulnerable.
On a recent podcast with UK health science company ZOE, consultant dermatologist Justine Kluk was critical of the hygiene hypothesis, which argues that small children are vulnerable to infection because their immune systems are not fully developed, so everything around them should be kept super clean.
“We have learnt that by not exposing kids to dirt and animals, we reduce the diversity of the microbes that live on their skin, and this affects the development of their immune system and increases the risk of people developing allergies and inflammatory skin disorders.”
In one of those “remarkable experiments” so beloved of health writers, children aged 2-5 were sent outside to “play in leaves and soil for some weeks”, said Kluk. “Researchers found they were less stressed and less angry, had higher gut serotonin levels, felt more connected to nature, were more prepared to eat vegetables, were interested in the environment and had greater variety and abundance of gut microbes.”
“When babies are born,” says Purvis, “they’re covered by vernix – a white, creamy substance on the skin. And we think that’s actually quite important for supporting the skin barrier in the first few days of life and has some antimicrobial properties as well, so protecting against infections.”
The days of whisking a baby away from its mother and returning it wiped down and wrapped up are long gone.
“We would now tend to pat them dry, maybe have a bath on day two or three. You don’t need to use a lot of skincare products for babies. Mostly what they need for bathing is water. I think there’s a commercial market that encourages people to buy things they don’t necessarily need for their skincare.”
Reiche adds, “There seems to be a plethora of products sold or promoted for babies. And they tend to have more fragrances, and quite often they’ll have preservatives that are irritating to the skin.”
As with so much else in life, getting off to a good start makes a difference. Allergy New Zealand CEO Mark Dixon sums up: “When we introduce elements that take away the skin’s natural protection, through our modern fixation on hygiene, particularly in early life, it can again reduce the immune system’s ability to ‘code’ which substances are potentially harmful, and which are harmless. This is part of the ‘hygiene theory’ that researchers have proposed to explain the increased development of allergies in the developed world.”
Now and later in life, the natural reaction to a skin problem is to clean the skin more. “And that allows a two-way street to open and that actually exacerbates the skin condition,” says Dixon.
Read the label
With so many soap products of one form or another on the shelves, how does the average grubby person in the street know what is right for them?
Don’t stress. Unless you have a troublesome skin condition, most products won’t actually do you any harm. “For most people, it doesn’t matter. Soap that they like and they find works for them is fine,” says Reiche.
And the microbiome, being a thing of wonder, has the ability to restore itself quite quickly if minor damage is done by overwashing.
But “natural”, “green”, “sensitive” and other words that look great on packaging don’t necessarily mean much. How do you know what you’re getting?
“I jump straight online and check the maker’s website,” says Dixon. “There’s often more information [there] about the ingredients than they can fit on a bottle. So that’s a precautionary step.”
Also, the internet has a big mouth and is always happy to talk. He recommends Allergy New Zealand’s Facebook site as well as member-driven support groups on social media, for which there is no such thing as too much information.
Reiche says products do typically say whether they’ve got fragrance or perfume – common allergy triggers – in them. Besides, “the majority of people do not need to use a soap or body wash that has ‘antibacterial’ written all over it”.
Adds Ecostore’s Iti: “Historical thinking was to put lots of fragrance in all your personal-care products. But actually, we really understood that it was a trigger for a lot of people. So many products are available with or without fragrance.”
Reiche sounds one warning. “Where there are antiseptics and antibacterial ingredients added to soap, we are starting to see skin problems – a redness and brownness on the skin, which we call granular parakeratosis. We think irritancy from these products might be starting to cause a skin condition that didn’t exist 10 years ago. That is causing harm to the microbiome diversity.”
More than cleansing
“When I go into a pharmacy and see all the soaps and body washes and shampoos,” says James Hamblin, “it looks to me like a hardware store with two full aisles of hammers. And they’re all different prices and colours and sizes. If you really liked the appearance of one of the hammers, maybe that can sway you to pay more for it.”
But they will all drive in nails. Different soaps for different folks. “If you really love the smell of something, maybe it’s worth it. If this is about ritual and calming and grounding and whatever, then it’s really not about sterilising. You want the thing that smells and looks the nicest on your shower shelves. That is the actual value to a lot of people.”
Figures on the size of the soap market are closely guarded by businesses but research company Circana says that scan data sales information for grocery stores shows the “personal wash” category is worth $126.5 million a year in New Zealand. Since 2013, the dollar value of soap bar sales has dropped from 34% to 21% of that category. Shower gels and liquid body washes have risen from 41% to 50% by value.
Supermarket shelves tell a further story: bars of soap are an endangered species. A few decades ago, soap came in a bar about the size of the palm of your hand, which is what it was designed for. It’s not entirely clear why, but soap in that form has been almost nudged off the shelves in favour of liquid soaps in plastic bottles that come in all sorts of sizes, usually with an annoying, childproof, twisty, squeezy top.
Why the change? One theory is that people grew to dislike putting something on their body that had been in direct contact with someone else’s body. This despite research showing that bacteria do not loiter in the lather waiting to latch onto the next unsuspecting bather.
Another plausible reason is that liquid soaps make more money for the people who produce them. “My impression is that you use a lot more when you use a liquid soap,” say Purvis. “There’s a lot more going down the drain and into the ocean because of it.”
Dispensers may be more convenient for the well co-ordinated, who can get the liquid to go where they want it to go on the first attempt and don’t lose half of it as it slides off their hand.
But there are also sound planet-saving reasons to use soap bars – for instance, they come wrapped in a bit of paper rather than a large amount of plastic that may not come from recycled materials or be recyclable itself. They are also more compact, so have lower transport costs.
Colgate-Palmolive, a leading player in the soap market, did not have anyone available to be interviewed for this story but offered to answer written questions. We emailed these but received no reply before deadline.
Taking the cake
The bar of soap will never die if Auckland man Matt Jones has his way. He began making soap partly as a hobby but also to find a cleansing product that his wife, who had psoriasis, could use. By the end of his experimenting he had several hundred bars of the stuff, so decided to take it to a market to sell. He now has a range he produces on a small scale under the SoapOman brand.
Jones does his market research at actual markets. “It started to go from just having the oatmeal soap to having people going, ‘Oh, have you got any activated charcoal soap?’ and ‘Have you got honey-beeswax soap for dry skin?’ and stuff like that. It was from talking to people in the market that we developed these ideas.”
He also discovered another reason people opt for liquids. “People have this perception that soap bars are just for use on your hands. I don’t know why. But a cleansing bar can be used all over.”
Interviews for this story revealed many people think soap is for hands and liquid cleansers are for everywhere else. Among other things, this means producers can make and sell two products where only one would do.
Reiche says liquid cleansers are no more effective than bars and can have other drawbacks. “When you add water to products, there’s a high chance they will grow organisms – bacteria and fungi. So companies have to add more preservatives so that when we buy their liquid product off the shelf, it’s not mouldy.
“Going back to the cake soaps for most of the population would be better for their skin and also better for the environment than all the plastic bottles with the implications for recycling and waterways and so forth.”
The great unwashed
Cleanliness has always been the focus of many taboos and carried a strong moral and even religious element. It is, after all, next to godliness.
This equation of moral with physical hygiene underlies a lot of our personal cleaning behaviour. It’s embedded itself deeply in the way we talk about being clean, and is even an indicator of moral fitness and social status. Clean things – sweeps and breaks – are good. Dirty things – jokes and dealings – are bad.
There was a time when hardly anyone washed much. Then came plumbing. Sure, it was pricey, but if you could afford it, you were clearly a cut above “the great unwashed”.
Hamblin believes these connotations are entrenched. “Once you start to read the history of these concepts, you see how widely ‘dirty’ is a derogatory term for a person. The terms themselves are so mixed up that they inform a lot of the biases and prejudices that people bring to talking about this issue.”
Blame the invention of soap. “The ability to mass-manufacture soap that did not irritate your skin was very important to public health.
“But after that, it was an escalation of cost and a status symbol. You didn’t really have a fundamental improvement in the product, you just had an improvement in raising the cost. The story of soap is the story of marketing.”