Showering Properly

A shower is not a meditation, a concert venue, or a place to stand and reconsider your life. It is a brief, purposeful act of hygiene, and the number of men who treat it as anything else is, I confess, genuinely alarming.

In my time, a man began the day with a cold or tepid sponge bath taken from a basin and pitcher. Not a full immersion. Not anything resembling leisure. You stood, you wrung the sponge, you attended to the matter briskly and with intent, and the shock of cool water against the skin was understood to be invigorating, a prompt to the circulation and a signal to the body that the day had commenced. The health manuals of that era recommended a cup of hot water on waking, followed by olive oil in lemon juice before breakfast, as digestive tonics to accompany the morning wash. The whole sequence was deliberate, considered, almost ceremonial in its purpose. Your modern shower is the descendant of that practice, and it has gained enormously in convenience. Indoor plumbing is, I will concede, an unambiguous improvement. But something has been lost in the inheritance: the briskness, the intention, the understanding that washing was not relaxation but preparation.

Warm water. Not hot. Hot water, which so many of you seem to regard as a birthright, strips the oils from your skin and hair and leaves you looking like something that has been left out in weather. Warm water, by contrast, opens the pores and softens the skin without parboiling you, which is a distinction worth preserving.

Wash your hair first. The shampoo will run down your body as you rinse, stripping oils from your skin on the way; this is precisely why you wash your body second, so the moisturising soap or wash can restore what the shampoo removed. The sequence is not complicated. It is gravity, working in your favour for once, and you need only cooperate with it.

Use soap or a body wash on the areas that require it: underarms, groin, feet, and anywhere that has been in contact with the world. The rest of your body does not need to be scrubbed raw every twenty-four hours, for your skin has its own maintenance programme, one that has been functioning rather well for millennia. Stop interfering with it.

Wash your feet deliberately. Standing in soapy water does not count, however much you might wish it did. Bend down and wash them as you would wash your hands, attending to the spaces between the toes and the bottoms with the same care you would give to any surface that meets the world. If this feels beneath you, I assure you that the alternative, which your companions will detect before you do, is considerably worse.

Dry yourself thoroughly. A damp man is not a clean man; he is a man who has postponed the problem. Towel off completely, including your back, before you dress, for putting clothes on a wet body is not getting dressed. It is upholstering.