Chemical engineer Dave Whitlock hasn’t taken a shower in 12 years and hopes that you’ll be willing to give up bathing, too. No, this isn’t a weird sex thing (not yet, anyway, DAVE). It’s a bacteria thing. Whitlock claims that spraying yourself twice daily with a bacterial formula—developed by his company, AOBiome—will keep you feeling fresh as an un-showered daisy.


“We’ve confused clean with sterile,” Jasmina Aganovic, AOBiome’s General Manager of Consumer Products, tells CBS Boston. “We’ve taken the dirt out of our lives. We don’t spend as much time outdoors as we used to, even little children.

According to Whitlock, an MIT grad, and his team of researchers, human beings have been too busy showering off the bacteria that keeps our skin (and the rest of our bodies) healthy.


“I have not taken a shower in over 12 years,” he tells CBS. “No one did clinical trials on people taking showers every day. So what’s the basis for assuming that that is a healthy practice?”

AOBiome has released a line of hygiene products—called Mother’s Dirt—to encourage people (at least the people who can afford a $40 bottle of shampoo) to give up showers in favor of bacteria sprays.

Soon, the company will begin clinical trials to find out what health benefits can be linked to their bacterial spray and whether or not Mother’s Dirt could scientifically be proven to help fight skin conditions like acne. Until those trials are completed, AOBiome is declining to assign any scientific claims to their product.

The good news: You are but a few well-tested experiments away from attributing your woke-up-too-late-didn’t-have-time-for-a-shower look to having a particularly health-conscious life style. The bad news: We’re not there yet, and—for now—you just look grubby.


Contact the author at madeleine@jezebel.com .