Am I the only one that takes showers either once a week or I will occasionally take one if I get really filthy, but otherwise only once every week or two...
This is actually what you're supposed to do. Daily bathing will not keep you cleaner. It DOES not get rid of smells. The smells are actually from the chemicals released by your body. Bathing washes these off, but they're right back there within a couple hours or less, depending on the person. That's the primary purpose people use it for. If smell bothers you so much, anti-perspirants work better at getting rid of it.
Bathing too frequently is actually bad for you. It washes away the oils on your skin. And while enough of it build up for a smell to be there, it's not enough for its function. It exists for a reason. It serves a purpose. A big one is protecting your skin. Frequent bathing can reduce your protection from ultraviolet radiation. Which means you'll get worse sunburns, more freckles and other blemishes, and a higher risk for various forms of skin cancer. This is entirely because of the function of these oils on the skin. They also hold in moisture, which means frequent bathing will actually dry out your skin, and add to the problems with the sun just mentioned. As well, it also reduces your protection against chemicals soaking through your skin into your body. Which means any number of problems caused by such chemicals will be worsened by it. This is because these skin oils are made up of atoms not soluble in water. This means that if you mix it in water, it'll stay separated. Most liquids that which could soak into the skin have water as their medium. That's why, before bathing, water beads up on your skin, and it just runs down you after. So any kind of cancers, illnesses, and other diseases that could be caused by being ingested a chemical, can still happen by just being soaked through your skin by bathing too much.
Frequent bathing merely for a natural smell is a reactionary response that has no basis in scientific fact. And it really is unfair say that anyone who doesn't shower daily automatically smells. That's neither polite nor entirely factual. Not everyone "gets smelly" at the same rate. And there are other methods that are less drastic that actually work better. Also, constantly avoiding a scent makes you hypersensitive to it next time you come across it. If people were more accepting of the natural constant odors, instead of scouring their skin daily or covering it up with chemicals, no one would notice it as much. It's really a silly habit that we picked up.
Oh, and I saved this for last. It is WASTEFUL. Water is a precious resource. There's more valuable things we can do with it, such as keeping people alive, instead of this constant battle, which actually harms you more than helps, to fight a harmless odor that we shouldn't even be complaining about. The constant odor is not the same as the heavy perspiration odor after high activity. They come from different sources. The former is what people are always fighting, when it's the latter that actually is what people think about when they talk about bathing.
