Taylor Swift‘s controversial revelation that she refuses to wash one part of her body when showering got people talking – including experts who can finally put our minds to rest.
It all began in 2019 when the singer sat down for an interview on The Ellen Show where the host, Ellen DeGeneres, asked her the question: “Do you wash your legs in the shower?”
Taylor then revealed that she does – but only when she shaves her legs.
Ellen then intervened, “Unless you’re not shaving… then you’re not washing.”
“No… I don’t think I would say that,” the pop icon hit back, to when Ellen chirped: “It seems like you did just say it!”
Her comments would become something that would come back to haunt her time and time again, having become an unlikely topic of online debate over the years.
However, maybe we can all get off Tay’s back as Dr Divya Shokeen, founder of Ocean, Skin and Vein Institute in California, has issued some potentially reassuring words.
Raj Punjabi and Noah Michelson, who are hosts of Huffington Post’s Am I Doing It Wrong? podcast, decided to quiz Dr Shokeen about showering.
At one point, the conversation specifically turned to the small matter of washing your legs while scrubbing down.
“I don’t think you do [need to wash them],” Dr Shokeen said. “Unless you’re, like, aggressively sweating and you just biked 20 miles. Then, yes, please wash your legs.
“I think water dripping down or soap dripping down [your legs] is OK [for cleansing].”
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Dr Shokeen continued to claim it’s actually probably better not to manually wash the legs because we risk drying out or irritating the skin.
She also explained that, when washing other body parts where bacteria tend to flourish – the armpits, for example – it’s best to leave the soap to do its thing for at least a minute.
“Those need at least a minute to allow [your cleanser] to work,” she added.
“That doesn’t mean you have to be rubbing down there for a minute. If you have the time, then do it, but you can suds up [those areas] and leave it [while you wash other parts], so your cleanser has to have the chance to actually do something.”
There you go, Taylor, if it’s good enough for a doctor, it’s good enough for us!
