The “everything shower” is what it sounds like: a once-a-week shower routine that involves a full, head-to-toe wash — no hair left unshaved or unshampooed, no crevice left un-soaped. There are hours of social media content on the ins and outs of the #everythingshower, from the best products to use (oils, scrubs, razors, gels) to how to use them (scrubbing, trimming, lathering) and in which order (take note, because it’s all in the order, I’ve learned). The concept has garnered headlines in the traditional media, too. “The ‘everything shower’ goes beyond shampoo and conditioner,” proclaims the Wall Street Journal, while Allure calls it a moment of “luxury.”
If showers were a sport, it’d be the year of the shower Olympics. Or maybe the hygiene Olympics?
Consuming so much cleanliness content, one could be forgiven for thinking the #everythingshower is about self-care. Look closer, though, and it’s clear the trend is just the next (mis)step in becoming the ultimate “Clean Girl” — both figuratively and literally.
The Clean Girl is the aspirational archetype on TikTok. She’s associated with a physical appearance that oozes perceived “cleanliness” — no-makeup makeup, slicked back hair; trends that are aesthetically coded as “clean” despite leaving users coated in layer upon layer of product residue. Being a Clean Girl is seen as a way of life, a look cultivated from the inside out through diet, exercise, skincare, and, as with the #everythingshower, personal hygiene practices.
This conflation of cleanliness and aspirational status is nothing new. The concept of being “clean” was constructed from imperialist, patriarchal, and colonialist ideals and throughout history, it’s been used to reinforce oppressive ideas about race and class. As The Unpublishable previously reported:
The “science” of cleansing is essentially a scam born of religious extremism, eugenics, racism, and classism. There's the whole “cleanliness is next to godliness” thing, of course (which is perpetuated through modern brands like Dieux Skin and Monastery and 100% Pure, and on the Dr. Bronner’s label, and in lingo like “skin savior” or “Holy Grail product”). Then during the Hygiene Revolution in the 1880s, being able to afford soap became a class marker, and the working class became known as “the great unwashed” (the idea of “rich people skin” is the current iteration). Also around this time, a German doctor published a book called Racial Hygiene, which later informed the eugenics movement, the Holocaust, and many of our modern ideas about morality and cleanliness and race (soap ads sometimes depicted effectiveness by illustrating a Black person as the “before” and a white person as the “after”; Dove just did this in 2017).
With hygiene as an age-old measure of a higher status, today’s Clean Girl aesthetic is nothing more than a modern way to separate the “washed” from “the great unwashed,” the Clean Girls from the not-Clean Girls.
But in our bid to out-shower one another, only the beauty industry wins.
“Bathing disrupts our skin’s microbiome: the delicate ecosystem of bacteria, fungi, mites and viruses that live on (and in) our body's largest organ,” NPR reports, while the BBC notes that “there are a lot of dermatologists who are seeing conditions like dry skin and eczema and acne that are made worse, it seems, when people get into these cycles of over washing.” When issues arise in reaction to cleansing or overcleansing, customers counterintuitively reach for more products to solve these problems. “Many people … could do less,” NPR offers. “We are told by marketing that it's necessary to do more than it actually is. Your health will not suffer. And your body is not so disgusting that you need to upend your microbial ecosystem every day.”
In other words: A quick rinse with water when you feel you need one is fine. You are not less clean, hygienic, or healthy if your #everythingshower doesn’t last over three hours and involve 13 time-sucking steps to soak, scrub, rub, shave, pluck and slick. On the contrary, your skin is likely better able to cleanse and protect itself.
And don’t get me started on the impact on the climate — all that product, all that water. It’s disorienting: in one breath, the beauty community claims to be mindful of its environmental impact; in the next, it promotes 60-minute showers featuring landfill-sized piles of products.
I understand the appeal of #showertok content. Like watching someone apply their makeup on the train, it feels intimate. But when intimacy is commodified, it allows the grimiest aspects of the beauty industry to thrive: A single trend can promote a racialized, idealized, and sexist concept of cleanliness; encourage wasteful overconsumption; and wear down the epidermis. We do it and hope that scrubbing, brushing, and lathering our skin into oblivion might reveal a new version of ourselves, a better version of ourselves, a cleaner version of ourselves. It won’t.
The #everythingshower is doing us dirty.
Original published on The Unpublishable newsletter
I secretly stopped showering every single day a few years back. Secretly because I know it would be a whole thing if the people in my life knew, lol. And yet, they wouldn't know if I don't tell them
Oooohhh I love this topic so much Z ❣️