mleku on Nostr: the teacher of a body piercing safety/technique training course i did back in 2006 ...

the teacher of a body piercing safety/technique training course i did back in 2006 told me that cleaning our skin actually only requires two things: blood-warm water (about 40 degrees C) and friction. she said soap was only useful when there is a lot of fat that could be occluding bacteria underneath it. even then, basically she said cleaning skin this way would be sufficient preparation to pierce safely, as long as the instrument was sterile.

rev hodl said he has not been washing with soap, except a bit on hands and feet for a long time and that he doesn't have any unpleasant odor. this got me thinking because i'm not a fan of most soaps anyway, and certainly not detergents, which compromise the skin membrane and allow more things to penetrate through the skin into the blood.

so i've started doing this now. i have a nylon mesh bauble scrubby thing, and so i just have a warm shower and scrub everything, especially my feet and face, but just use water and friction. it does feel better. i'm curious to see how it makes my skin look after time also, i suspect that because my skin pH will normalise to its natural level, it will look a lot better. also because i'm getting older, my melanin does not color as evenly as it used to, i'll be pretty stoked if it also helps with the health of the melanocytes causing them to become more consistent again. my skin was always very smooth and even color before. well, i don't really care so much about that, i'm mainly interested in seeing if it improves other things, like healing and stuff like the mutant hairs that grow longer, randomly, as you get older (the classic old man eyebrows, for instance). because i figure, if my pH is normalised, the bacteria on my skin is healthy stuff only, that probably the DNA damage will also be reduced, and i think as well as the hair follicles and melanocytes it will make everything more healthy.

it certainly feels ok.

the other thing is my scalp. i expect this to take a bit longer, as constantly removing the natural oils causes the oil secreting of hair follicles to increase to compensate. at first, i think this is going to mean my hair is a bit more oily than normal, but warm water softens the oils, especially the shine-producing waxes, and so long as i wash it regularly with warm water and brush regularly, it will normalise within a week or two.

scalp especially is problematic because the hair makes it harder to remove the dead skin. this has long been a problem for the last few years which i also think had something to do with food allergies. a lot of areas that are itchy and dead skin building up. and yeah, maybe it also will revive some of the follicles that have stopped growing, i'm not going bald, by any means, but especially around the temples it has got a lot thinner. it always was fine, thin hair before anyway, it just probably is more vulnerable to all the shit that gets in due to detergents in shampoo breaching the membrane.

will be reporting as things progress how it goes.