What's the longest you've gone without a shower/bath. Why?
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Probably a week as a kid, when camping. But I'd swim every day which kinda caps the grossness to an extent.
Also before puberty I'd go days between baths.
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Probably pushing 2 months. I was thru hiking the Appalachian Trail and was in full on dirty hippie mode.
This is so cool seeing inspiring stories where I only expected grossness!
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4 days, music festival.
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Not very long as an adult, handful of days, maybe 4 or 5 when very sick.
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Mount Buffalo National Park, 1982. Four of us left the camping area to watch the sunset. I stopped to take a photo and lost the trail. Went running after the others, slipped and rolled down a cliff, landed upright, but felt both ankles pop and break. (The whole park is Australian bush around granite boulders and cliffs). The others thought I had gone back to camp and didn’t report me missing. Next morning the group packed up and hiked to the next camp site, no one noticed I was missing until that evening, so they looked in the wrong place. I crawled to a creek and fell down the gully, drank snow melt, no one heard me shouting and crying. Eventually they gave me up for dead. Three German tourists found me by accident three weeks later, one went to get help. I got a ride in a helicopter, in hospital for two weeks while they fed me through a drip. The school gave me a payout through their insurance on the condition we didn’t sue them. I’m almost 60 now and my ankles still hurt and grind and pop.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Holy fuck that is a wild story. I'd watch the film adaptation.
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Get a bidet, and it makes it easier to put a day or two between showers.
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Several weeks. Usually I shower before leaving the house so when I was too depressed and anxious to leave the house I felt no reason to take one. But I don't shower as much as most people in general. Once a week maybe unless I'm sweaty or dirty. I also brush my teeth inconsistently. But I've never had a cavity, fungal infection or anything else hygiene related anywhere on my body. I also don't stink in case you're wondering
I disinfect my pits and use deodorant daily, I always check myself and my clothes and I also ask friends sometimes to be sure.I was in the "I don't brush my teeth consistently but I've never had a cavity so it's probably fine" camp until I got dental insurance and found out I did, in fact, have cavities :[ they had been slowly progressing and I was lucky they got to them before they broke all the way through the enamel
if you have the means to do so, even if you have to look up dental training schools that do exams really cheap, please get your dental exams as close to biannually as you can, you're worth it
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A week is my usual. I know, I know, but my mental health is a lot worse than my body odour.
I'm really irritated at how depression has made me an expert in cleaning individual parts of my body to prevent stink (pits, privates, hair over side of tub, feet, etc.) all to avoid just stepping into the fuckin shower and getting it all over with at once
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5 days. was so sick i couldnt even play video games. all i had was mr. beat videos to help me. i stunk like fucking shit on the 5th day but was finally well enough to actually get up and move around. best shower of my life
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9 months.
I was hiding inside another human being.
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9 months.
I was hiding inside another human being.
What a fun round of hide and seek right? Good times!
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Damn fine country there
If I win the lottery, I'm building a little house down there.
Check out Natural Bridge if you are ever in the area!
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wrote on last edited by [email protected]A bit over a month? This was in the winter and I didn't feel unclean/like I needed it so I just kinda forgot.
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Several weeks. Usually I shower before leaving the house so when I was too depressed and anxious to leave the house I felt no reason to take one. But I don't shower as much as most people in general. Once a week maybe unless I'm sweaty or dirty. I also brush my teeth inconsistently. But I've never had a cavity, fungal infection or anything else hygiene related anywhere on my body. I also don't stink in case you're wondering
I disinfect my pits and use deodorant daily, I always check myself and my clothes and I also ask friends sometimes to be sure.I've switched my tooth brushing from before I go to bed (it became a mental barrier for going to bed) to doing it after washing my hands when I arrive home.
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wrote on last edited by [email protected]Like a week? It was at girls camp and I was doing “PTA baths” pits, tits and ass but the water in the showers were ICE COLD, like it was literally the same temp as the glacier lake our camp was at that we were not allowed to swim in for more than ten minutes at a time so we wouldn’t die. Putting my head under that water to rinse my hair was physically painful. There was a huge camp wide hike that me and a few other girls managed to skip out on and we all took hot showers, there was like maybe a dozen of us, and it was glorious. Then like, hours later, everyone comes back and the next morning during announcements they were bitching “some girls stayed back and used all the hot water so the leaders (adults) didn’t have any” like bitch what? We NEVER have hot water, we have painfully cold water, and it had hours to reheat before they even got back, suck it up and stop hogging all the hot water for yourselves! I didn’t feel bad and still don’t twenty years later
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Probably a week as a kid, when camping. But I'd swim every day which kinda caps the grossness to an extent.
Also before puberty I'd go days between baths.
I feel like swimming significantly amplifies the grossness? I guess it depends on the water
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6 months, during high school over the winter. Shower was broken (water would only come out perfectly hot or cold, nothing in between) and parents/landlord would not fix it. I kinda just gave up on it. Nothing bad came out of it. Nobody at home or at school ever said anything or even noticed, as far as I could tell. No, they were not just being polite. I watched everyone closely, as much as an experiment of personal curiosity as anything else, and there were no signs of disapproval, nobody had a clue. I suffered no social consequences whatsoever. Wearing a new set of clothes every day alone was sufficient to stay clean.
Can't decide whether I just have one of those Asian genes that make you not smell, or whether Americans as a culture are psychotically brainwashed by soap companies' propaganda to the point where even the idea of "spending more than 1 day away from shower" is worse than death for them. Never used deodorant either (other than to try it out - just makes me feel gross, sticky, and smelly). Imagine how much money those deodorant companies are missing out on me over a lifetime!
wrote on last edited by [email protected]If I go 6 hours after a shower without deodorant, my armpits usually have started smelling. It ain't just big soap, it's genetics or something.
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wrote on last edited by [email protected]Three weeks, over a very hot summer. Our office manager had the only key to the thermostat for the whole office, and refused to put the air conditioning on. I stopped bathing in protest. At this time I also commuted by bike (17 kms each way) daily and absolutely stunk. I’m still amazed he took three whole weeks to cave…
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11 days.
Texas ice storm in 2021 froze the pipes from the well. We had stored water in jugs and the bathtubs in anticipation of the storm, but it was for drinking, cooking, and flushing the toilet.
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Mount Buffalo National Park, 1982. Four of us left the camping area to watch the sunset. I stopped to take a photo and lost the trail. Went running after the others, slipped and rolled down a cliff, landed upright, but felt both ankles pop and break. (The whole park is Australian bush around granite boulders and cliffs). The others thought I had gone back to camp and didn’t report me missing. Next morning the group packed up and hiked to the next camp site, no one noticed I was missing until that evening, so they looked in the wrong place. I crawled to a creek and fell down the gully, drank snow melt, no one heard me shouting and crying. Eventually they gave me up for dead. Three German tourists found me by accident three weeks later, one went to get help. I got a ride in a helicopter, in hospital for two weeks while they fed me through a drip. The school gave me a payout through their insurance on the condition we didn’t sue them. I’m almost 60 now and my ankles still hurt and grind and pop.
Oh man, that's insane story! I can't imagine how hard had you been through in these three weeks surviving alone in the snowy wild.
