The Not-So-Smelly Truths of Washing Like the French
By: Dave Smurthwaite
Tags: Travel, Wellness, France, Health, World

It’s easy to fall for the City of Love.

Just don’t expect it to always smell like a fresh bouquet of roses.

This is especially true in the summertime, on crowded metros when the smell of body odor mixed with cigarette smoke can knock you over faster than you can say “Mon Dieu, d’où vient cette odeur??” (translation: where on God’s green earth is that rank smell coming from)

As Americans, it’s hard for us to understand (naive teenagers aside) how anyone can stand body odor.

Who showers better?

An AOL Health poll conducted in 2009 revealed that 65 percent of Americans shower or bathe every day, while 4 percent shower more than once every day.

Contrast this with the French, who, while not too far off from the American average, still manage to make showering less of a thing.

In a recent poll conducted in France, only 57% of respondents reported showering daily.

From the local climate to energy costs to advertising, there are numerous factors as to why one culture showers more than another.

The Atlantic Journalist James Hamblin recently reported that we waste nearly two years of our lives washing:

“12,167 hours... That’s how much life you use, if you spend 20 minutes per day washing and moisturizing your skin and hair (and you live to be 100, as we all surely will). That adds up to nearly two entire years of washing every waking hour.”

If you consider that the average American shower, according to Home Water Works, takes 17.2 gallons of water, you begin to better understand the French perspective.

As one American teacher who regularly teaches study abroad in France pointed out in a New York Times Opinion Piece:

“Having spent a number of summers teaching… [I’ve] witnessed enough conflicts between students and the [French] families they live with to know that cleanliness is an endless source of cultural misunderstanding. [American] students feel that one can’t shower enough and that clothing should never be worn more than once, whereas their French lodgers worry about water bills and can’t understand why anyone would want to shower every day.”

While the occasional bout of body odor might be disagreeable in France, it’s preferred to not being able to afford your energy bill at the end of the month.

Should we shower every day?

Sweat, believe it or not, is actually odorless. It is pumped out of your body in two different types of irrigation systems: eccrine glands and apocrine glands.

Eccrine glands are found all over your body. As your body temperature rises, these glands act as an internal water cooler, releasing fluids to cool off your body. If ever you start sweating in areas you didn’t know you could sweat, you can thank the eccrine glands.

In general, eccrine glands do not contribute to body odor. It’s your other irrigation system, the apocrine glands, that make the big stink.

Apocrine glands are found on the parts of your body where you naturally have hair (namely your armpits and groin). If it helps, think of them as the trickling streams running through forests of body hair.

These trickling streams flow freely with a milky fluid when your body is under stress (emotional, mental, and physical). Again, this milky fluid by itself is largely odorless. The foul-smelling reaction occurs when the sweat comes in contact with the bacteria on the skin.

As you can tell from the forest of hairs analogy, I’m not a doctor nor do I play one on Medium. That being said, I’m willing to bet that if you only shower once every two days, like 24% of the French people you meet, there is going to be more bacteria on their bodies.

Which, contrary to what your nose might tell your brain, is not necessarily a bad thing.

Our skin is designed to maintain a layer of oils, bacteria, and other microorganisms.

When we hop in the shower or bath, we wipe our skin clean of these positive protective influences.

The side effects, as reported by Harvard Medical School, can be far more damaging than an occasional bout with body odor:

Skin may become dry, irritated, or itchy.

Dry, cracked skin allows bacteria and allergens to more easily creep in, allowing skin infections and allergic reactions to occur.

Antibacterial soaps can actually kill off normal bacteria, upsetting the balance of microorganisms on the skin.

Frequent baths or showers throughout a lifetime may reduce the ability of the immune system to do its job.

Perhaps instead of recoiling at the smell of body odor on the French metro and elsewhere, we could recognize the possible factors leading that person to smell the way they do: including saving the planet, being healthier, or affording rent at the beginning of next month.

We don’t have to fully embrace them (especially if they’re sweaty), but we should learn to appreciate them.