This whole hygiene awareness became a bigger thing for me in recent years from two perspectives. First, I started trying to observe a Paleolithic diet. Back when I was still smoking, I wanted to at least ensure that the food going inside my body was healthier and made of natural ingredients. It turns out the Paleolithic lifestyle also includes workouts and other daily habits beyond just food, but that’s a story for another time.
Anyway, that diet mindset also made me hyper-aware of what I was washing my body with. Look, I like Axe soap and other similar brands as much as the next guy. They smell great, but reading the back label feels like something straight out of a high school chemistry class. I suspect not everything in there is actually doing us any good, it just wasn’t killing us on the spot, so companies deemed it okay to use.
So, I started looking for body soaps made with natural ingredients that don’t leave you smelling like a Disney princess. That’s when I came across several natural soap brands. I tried a few, and they’re actually fantastic. They offer a wide assortment of masculine scents that can cater to almost any nose, and they genuinely make you feel cleaner while leaving your skin feeling healthier.
One caveat, though: I got so excited about one of them that I was scrubbing my entire body far more than I normally would. Since soap naturally breaks down fat, it stripped my skin completely dry. Suddenly, I found myself needing to put on body lotion just to stop feeling like parchment paper.
Heads up: some links below are Amazon affiliate links. If you buy through them, I get a small cut at no extra cost to you, one step closer to the man cave. I only link gear I actually use. Sometimes what I own is a local brand you can’t get on Amazon, in that case I link the closest match I can find and I’ll say so.
And right then and there, I understood the ultimate Catch-22 of the female beauty routine: every product you use creates a problem that requires a second product to fix what the first one broke while doing its job. It’s an endless loop.
Since I wasn’t about to start shopping for male body lotions, maybe one day, but definitely not today, I adjusted my approach. After consulting with my dermatologist, I now mostly soap the intimate parts (armpits included), lightly wash the body itself, and hardly soap my face at all, maybe once or twice a week at most.
Because as Jim Jefferies said in one of his classic stand-up routines, your body gets used to producing its own oils when it realizes it can’t rely on you to supply them.
Another thing to watch out for: most of these natural bar soaps come with different degrees of “grit” (or peeling, in female terms). I tried one with oats in it because it sounded promising. I thought, “Hey, oats can’t hurt me.” Well, turns out if you scrub yourself hard enough with oats, you end up looking like you just escaped a catfight with every stray cat in the neighborhood, and lost.
My advice? Choose the grit level very carefully. And if you find a scent you love, lather up on your chest area where you’re naturally hairier and spread it out to the more sensitive areas from there. Unless, of course, you’re actually going for that freshly-scratched look, in which case, more power to you.
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