The Everything Shower Gets One Thing Right

Body care deserves more attention. That doesn’t mean it needs more steps.

By Ellen Dabela, MD
Board-Certified Dermatologist and Founder of Eddy

Over the weekend, my brother-in-law sent me a Wall Street Journal article asking whether washing the body once is “still” enough. Four days later, The Guardian was asking essentially the same question. The shower, it seems, is having a moment. On ShowerTok, some creators have embraced the “double cleanse”: clean once to remove sweat, sunscreen, deodorant, and oil, then clean again to hydrate, deliver an active ingredient, or add fragrance. These routines are part of the larger “everything shower,” an extended session that might also incorporate scrubs, masks, shaving, hair treatments, oils, and moisturizers. 

As a dermatologist, I understand the appeal. I’ve had patients do versions of this, and I’ve even done it myself. When the first wash doesn’t fully address lingering odor or residue, a second, more focused cleanse of the underarms can sometimes help. And it makes sense from a ritual perspective too: for years, the beauty world devoted enormous attention to the face while treating body care as relatively utilitarian. The everything shower corrects some of that imbalance and turns an ordinary task into a ritual.

You don’t need a doctor to tell you that it’s OK to use your shower as a time to relax and care for yourself. Using a second body wash because you enjoy its scent, or setting aside time for a longer routine because it makes you feel cared for, does not require a medical justification. The Journal makes this point too: fragrance and the experience of the ritual are part of what people enjoy about double cleansing. (I’ll save the dermatologist’s opinion on fragrance for another day.) 

In some scenarios, a second cleanse may be useful. Frequent exercise, outdoor work, heavy sunscreen use, breakouts, and body odor are all situations in which someone may benefit from more thorough cleansing. I would hesitate, though, to turn double cleansing into a new baseline for good hygiene. 

Showering should be fairly straightforward: remove what we do not want on the skin without unnecessarily irritating the skin itself. Whether a second cleanse is useful depends on what you are trying to remove, where you are cleansing, which products you are using, and how your skin tolerates them. More cleanser and more friction do not produce an infinitely better result. Tightness, burning, persistent itching, or redness can be signs that a routine has become too aggressive. 

As a dermatologist, I know that skin varies from the face to the feet to the folds. It’s all skin, but it’s not uniform. We put different products on different areas, expose them to different conditions, and may want to spend more time cleansing some places than others. That does not require scrubbing harder or inventing a complicated shower map. It simply means being a little more deliberate about what we are trying to accomplish.

Body care has become increasingly sophisticated. There are washes, scrubs, acids, oils, serums, masks, and deodorizing products for nearly every concern. What interested me was whether more thoughtful cleansing necessarily had to mean a more complicated routine.

Eddy is a body brush designed to bring a more deliberate approach to cleansing. It fits into the shower you already take and can be used with the cleanser you already like.

The everything shower gets the central idea right: the body deserves attention, and a shower can be both functional and restorative.

A better shower doesn’t necessarily require more of everything.

Eddy is a dermatologist-developed approach to more deliberate, less complicated cleansing. Join early access below.