Hollywood stars like Mila Kunis, Jake Gyllenhaal, Dax Shepard and Ashton Kutcher share a dirty secret about why they avoid shower scenes — and even bathtubs — in an effort to save their own skin, and the planet. Is this smart environmental policy, or should they imitate Dwayne ‘the Rock’ Johnson — who showers three times daily?
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20 replies on “Dirty Secret: Hollywood Stars Avoid Shower Scenes to Save Their Own Skin…and the Planet”
I always had a dog in the house growing up. I’m not allergic to anything. My cousins grew up in a museum. They had all sorts of alerigic complications.
I used to work w/ actroids. They’re not the smartest of creatures.
There is a popular belief that Europeans in the medieval and renascence era did not bathe often but historians and archaeologists point out that this is false.
Bath houses were as common mills and granaries. The rich had them in their great houses, lined with tiles, grout and cut stone. The poor had little huts perched on a wharf extending out over a pond, lake or river. Most had fires and caldrons to warm the water though hot water was rare. Bathing in lukewarm water was normal. We know this because all over Europe we have ordinances regulating them. Travel and pilgrimage guides directing you to them or complaining about their poor quality.
We know many bathed in rivers and stream because there are regulations for it. There are also the court records of peeping toms who were caught at the designated women’s bathing locations. Thousands of cases across Europe. Peeping toms often ended up in public stocks for all to pelt rubbish at.
Often water mills had provision to divert water into a bath house with showers. Some even had clay pipe water heaters that warmed the water in winter. We know this from some French archaeology and a tale of a rather unfortunate fire where someone attending to the baths heater (drunk) burned down the mill, the bathhouse and a bakery.
Wherever there was a good hot spring like in Bath in England or Spa in Belgium bath houses abounded. Yet there are far more bath streets than hot springs.
Further north in Scandinavia steam rooms and saunas were common. Even churches had them and some still do. These had wash basins. Jumping in a frozen lake afterwards was optional.
In Europe the Roman Catholic church tried to ban some public bath houses and spas to stop the spread of syphilis but this was not because they thought bathing caused syphilis but because the homosexuals of era met an these baths. The Vatican’s attempt to stamp out the VD failed. They were being too indirect.
With the industrial revolution people moved from country to city and the bath house there were over whelmed, over worked and quickly wrecked. The water became polluted and unsafe. War often destroyed aqueducts, channels and pipes supplying them. In the age of cannon, lead and copper pipes were often ripped up and made into cannon and shot. The river bath houses in the empty countryside fell into disrepair, rotted or were salvaged for wood.
Modernity means we can do it with little effort or cost but bathing once a day was possible if you had a good river bath house handy or had an architect design one into the castle or mansion.
I concur. For years I worked closely with the historic kitchens team at Hampton Court Palace and they do a lot of experimental work on cooking mostly, but also other aspects of domestic life in the late medieval/early modern period. I forget the lady’s name but they knew a re-enactor who experimented with a Tudor hygiene for six months, at the end of this time she smelled like…a person.
White collar washes their hands after using the restroom.
True blue collar washes their hands BEFORE..
The body wasn’t ‘designed’ to have vaccines and modern medicine, yet I don’t think they are likely to give those up.
I wonder how long any of the mentioned “celebrities” would have lasted in the village where Scott was. Not that they would go there on purpose, unless it was for the fishing expedition on the pretty river that was mentioned. I imagine that trip is relatively pricey (compared to the lunch Scott mentioned).
Bill’s 3 1/2 Days video pops into mind.
Considering all the other filthy things those people do, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. It doesn’t to me and it should not to you.
Ok, now that said …
I live alone, there are days I don’t even break a sweat. I don’t shower those days because it’s a waste of my time and I’m not so vain as to think some small accumulation of skin oils is going to steal my virtue and cause me to worship the devil.
There are days when I work outside and then I do break a sweat. In fact in this climate I can get soaked in the stuff. Those days I take a shower.
If I’m going to be around other people for any reason I take a shower. This is less vanity and more respect for them than anything else.
So … Here’s a plausible scenario —
Day 1. Took a shower last night, got up and worked in 72 degree AC sitting in a desk chair all day. Never walked further than 10 steps at a time. Nuked my dinner in the microwave (didn’t cook, don’t smell like cooking food), watch an hour of TV, go to bed and read until I get drowsy. No shower all day.
Day 2. Got up this morning and had to go into town to get fuel for ______. Took a shower. Stopped and had breakfast at my favorite small cafe. Got home, worked outside for 3 hours burning the fuel I picked up this morning. Got sweaty. Have to go to town again this afternoon to meet my sister so took a shower at lunchtime. Went to town again. Came home, worked outside until dark. Got sweaty again, took another shower.
See the pattern there? I get clean when I’m dirty, I don’t shower because I might be dirty. I don’t give a fig about how much water I use, I have a water well and a septic system so the water automatically recycles eventually anyway. The price of water to me is the electricity it takes to pump it. When I have to be around people I take a shower whether I think I need it or not. When I wasn’t living alone I took at least one shower every day. If I’m on vacation, visiting someone, or spending a weekend with my buddy in his cabin bass fishing and brewery/distillery crawling — I take at least one shower every day but usually not more than one unless I need it. I.E. sometimes when we go up to the cabin there’s work to do, cutting trees, mowing, etc. that we do before having fun.
On the opposite end of that spectrum is my college age nephew. He showers when he get up in the morning. He showers again at noon. If he detects so much as a bead of sweat on his body somewhere he rushes off to the shower at his first opportunity. He showers again after dinner. He showers one more time before he goes to bed. I’ve known that kid to take up to eight showers a day. This is ridiculous. He is so afraid of “being dirty” he spends half his day with water running over himself.
He’s a pain in the ass about it too. My sister, his mother, lives very near me. Sometimes I need an extra hand with something so I call over there and ask her to send him to me to help out for a bit. I cannot begin to count the times she’s said “He’s in the shower” and I’ve said “Good, I’m going to give him a reason to take another one. Send him over as soon as he gets out, or get him out, but get him here in 10 minutes”.
When I was in the Marine Corps the SOP “in garrison” was to take a shower sometime after evening chow. To wash off the days dirt and exertion. Then put on clean clothes. Go to bed clean, between clean sheets and sleep. Get up the next morning and PT in PT gear. Take a quick shower, put on yesterday’s clean clothes which will now become today’s dirty clothes. Go practice killing bad guys, digging useless holes and filling them in again, whatever. Go to evening chow and then repeat the cycle.
I don’t recall ever being offended by the smell of anyone who followed that regimen and believe me, if you’re going to get dirty and sweaty that’s where it’s going to happen. Even then, two showers a day (more like one and a half) sufficed just fine. Notice I’m not saying people didn’t smell like people, they did but it wasn’t to the point where you would make an issue of it. There were consequences for stinking up the place and those were very, very unpleasant. I never had that problem either.
Ok, now the opposite end of that … When in the field, especially under combat conditions in a foreign land, hygiene can suffer a bit. It’s still very highly stressed because hygiene breakdown can make you less than fully healthy. If you’re not healthy your ability to fight is compromised accordingly. A healthy Marine is a deadly Marine, a sick Marine is a casualty. However, there are logistical priorities depending on the circumstances.
Bullets, beans and drinking water are priority #1, everything else is secondary. You can end up going for longer than you’d like to without seeing any sort of shower or stream or anything else to get cleaned up in and the good water you have is all for drinking.
In some parts of the world you have to stay out of streams, ponds, lakes and rivers as much as possible because they contain nasty parasites and diseases. They might be skin breaching or they might be worse. In some parts of the third world there are some pretty nasty things that will crawl up your urethra or anus or into your eyes, ears, nose and mouth and really mess you up. Look up leishmaniasis, schistosomiasis, enterobius, Guinea worm, or if you really want to get grossed out look up the canero (candiru) fish.
You do the best you can with what you’ve got. When you RTB (Return To Base) there’s a long queue at the showers. And medical attention if needed. But …
You know all those war movies and such? Yeah, the thing they don’t tell you and what no recruiter will ever say to a recruit is all the nasty rashes you can develop in those conditions. Seriously. Nasty. Rashes.
The point of all this? I reckon I know about as much on this topic and the extremes as anyone and more than most. Hollywood celebrities getting themselves cleaned up is a matter of degree and need like anyone else. Hollywood celebrities talking about what pigs they are thinking they’re signalling great virtue is another matter entirely. Fortunately it’s very unlikely that I’ll ever meet any of these people and the “force of the market” will deal with them in due course. If they take their “au naturel” too far it won’t be hard to notice and when it gets bad enough to cost them work, or people refuse to work around them, they’ll clean up.
I would venture that anyone that had to live a life, such as our pioneers back in the day, without running water, electricity, grocery stores, motorized transportation, heating and cooling systems and such would ever refuse it so as to “live off the land.” They did because there was no other choice. While there are some who relish this existence, there are not many who do. Hiking and camping are ok for most, for a short time, but not as a lifestyle. Living this way gets old pretty fast when you have a very comfortable alternative to return to. If time travel were possible, I think most of our ancestors would choose todays world and not return to the times of struggling to simply survive, in spite of the crap that society has become.
Theodore Dalrymple wrote a book called “Our Culture Or What’s Left Of It” that dealt with this return to the primitive. A first world problem indeed, but with ramifications for the future.
It’s one thing to act out a parody, it’s quite another to be the living embodiment of one.
These shallow sanctimonious hypocrites wouldn’t last five seconds in a truly primitive environment, and those that did would turn it into a Lord of the Flies hell scape very quickly. I gladly wash my hands of them😉
Which brings me back to the earlier days when someone like Sheryl Crow can suggest that the average person should only use one square of toilet paper per restroom visit, except, of course, on those pesky occasions where two to three could be required. Entertainers and Hollywood. Eeeww.
Looking at this photo, Sheryl looks like she not only took a shower, but shampoo and conditioner went into the hair. Organic of course.
The hypocrisy of Hollywood on full display. Being clean, daily showers = bad, but they’ll vote for this man, sometimes twice!
Look at him. Just look at him. This guy looks like a 3 shower a day guy, 1 shower to get the (flop)sweat off, and 2 showers to remove the daily accumulated political ‘dirt’ which comes naturally to an in-law to Nancy Pelosi.
Back then there was also no air conditioning or heating, no mattresses, no toilets . . . you get the idea. If you cut yourself and it got infected, you probably died.
It is the height of first world problems that we get to decide that we don’t want to bathe, don’t want to eat things grown in-organically, don’t want to wear clothes made by evil corporations. Much of our world today doesn’t bathe daily because their homes don’t have running water. They eat whatever they can find, because there isn’t enough. They wear whatever they can to protect them from the elements, because that is all there is.
Just more evidence that one does not have to be very bright to be a celebrity and then considered an intellectual by many simply because they are famous and rich.
As with most virtue signaling out of Hollywood there is usually something from Pryor or Carlin or Williams to cover it. This is Carlin from the late 90s I think.
“All you really need is to wash the four key areas: armpits, asshole, crotch, and teeth!” – George Carl
If you wait long enough, most trends come back around. I have my satin shirts just in case. Though they would be crop tops 😉 Enjoy that visual.
Thumbs down just for that visual!!!!!! “Ron”, how could you on a Monday?
When these actors/actresses are on set they are usually wearing quite a bit of chemicals to look just so. I say they they should be taking time to let their body return to normal. Look at some of these people when they are older, after years of makeup and hot lights.
For the rest of us, follow your gut. If you need a shower/bath, please take one. Balance the dirt and normal skin excretion. Don’t go extreme either way for very long.
And above all, do some honest research for yourself. Don’t feel bullied by anyone else.
They did have streams and oceans.
But perfumes and colognes were invented to cover smells that *we as a species didn’t like*. You know, just like we didn’t like being hungry. Or being unsafe from predators and raiders. So we did something about these things.
And I will bet that perfumes — the applying of a covering scent, probably botanical, goes back a lot farther that the first extracts made for this purpose.
I read a piece on preserving one’s “Iron Skin” by washing infrequently. The author argued that the outer skin layer (dead cells) help to protect the body from disease. I don’t know about that, but it certainly could be a non-chemical form of birth control. Thank goodness that “smell-a-vision” never gained traction. This adds new meaning to saying “that actor stinks.”