Believe It Or Not, You Can Stop Washing This Part Of Your Body In The Shower

What’s the “right” way to draw an x? Are Sour Patch Kids-flavored Oreos delicious or nasty? Is a hotdog a sandwich? The internet is always happy to offer — and debate — an answer for whatever ridiculous question won’t stop rattling around in our heads.

But one question stopped us in our tracks when we saw it pop up in 2019 and it’s continued to haunt us since then: Do we really need to wash our legs when we’re in the shower?

Countless people claimed that because the soap from lathering the upper parts of our bodies trickles down our legs as we bathe, there is no reason to specifically wash our legs. Others argued that without deliberately attending to our legs, they’re still dirty after we get out of the tub.

So who’s right?

That’s what we — Raj Punjabi and Noah Michelson, hosts of HuffPost’s “Am I Doing It Wrong?” podcast — asked Dr. Divya Shokeen, the founder of Ocean Skin & Vein Institute in Manhattan Beach, California, when she dropped by the studio to talk about all the ways we might be showering wrong and how to do it better.

Listen to the full episode by pressing play:

“I don’t think you do [need to wash them],” Dr. Shokeen told us. “Unless you’re, like, aggressively sweating and you just biked 20 miles. Then, yes, please wash your legs.”

That’s because our legs are often covered by our pants or other clothing, which protects them from dirt and grime, and they aren’t “hot spots,” like the armpits or crotch, where sweat and bacteria tend to flourish.

“I think water dripping down or soap dripping down [your legs] is okay [for cleansing],” she said, adding that it’s actually better not to manually wash our legs because that keeps the skin from drying out or becoming irritated, which can happen when we cleanse too