We’ll let you decide if his reason compels you enough to curb taking showers too.
For a culture that sets the standard of taking a bath at least once a day, Filipinos might get frustrated that actor Jake Gyllenhaal has an apparent aversion to showering. However, in a recent interview with Vanity Fair, the Spider-Man: Far From Home villain and the ambassador for Prada’s newest fragrance has a sound basis for his non-bathing ways.
He confessed to Vanity Fair that taking a bath has gotten tedious over time, and imparted his belief that avoiding baths does have its benefits.
“More and more I find bathing to be less necessary, at times,” he said. “But I do also think that there’s a whole world of not bathing that is also really helpful for skin maintenance, and we naturally clean ourselves.”
But hey, at least he believes in brushing his teeth, something for which he draws inspiration from singer-songwriter and oral hygiene advocate Elvis Costello. “I do believe, because Elvis Costello is wonderful, that good manners and bad breath get you nowhere. So I do [brush my teeth].”
Gyllenhaal is the latest name on a growing list of A-list celebrities who have disturbingly shunned the time-tested rituals of showering. The uproar started when celebrity couple Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher revealed to actor Dax Shepard on his Armchair Expert podcast that they do not wash their full bodies with soap every day.
“I wash pits and t— and holes and soles,” Kunis revealed, while her husband bared that he only washes my armpits and my crotch daily, and nothing else ever.” They follow the same regimen with regard to their children, sharing that they only bathe them if and when “you can see the dirt on ‘em. […] Otherwise, there’s no point.”
Far from being repulsed, Shepard even shared a similar revelation in an episode of The View that also had his wife Kirsten Bell over. Echoing his conversation with Kunis and Kutcher, Shepard jokingly shared that he and Bell would sometimes overlook giving their children baths for “five, six days” at a time.
“I’m a big fan of waiting for the stink,” Bell doubled down on the discussion. “Once you catch a whiff, that’s biology’s way of letting you know you need to clean it up. … So I don’t hate what they’re doing. I wait for the stink.”
Granted, there aren’t any guidelines on when and how often someone should wash themselves. But celebrities waiting until they stink seems to be a strange standard to follow — if you already smell today, then you should’ve taken a bath yesterday.
Besides, it’s not like the recommendation to shower once a day was drawn out of thin air. Experts from Harvard Medical School support the suggestion not just to avoid smelling, but to prevent our pores from being clogged with dirt and bacteria and allergens to breach the barrier of our dry, unwashed skin.
Being stuck in lockdown lets us enjoy these little liberties of postponing bath time, for sure, but please, let’s not turn “celebrity stink” into a trend.
