Jolie Kerr is a cleaning expert and advice columnist. She'll be here every week helping to answer your filthiest questions. Are you dirty? Email her.
Quick question: Is it OK for my family members and I to all use the same loofah in the shower? Initially, my husband and I each had our own, but somehow one disappeared so we're sharing one. We don't have a fancy natural sponge, it's just a drug store plastic ball of fluff that gets rinsed out after each person, and I figured it doesn't really matter. But now my kid is getting to be old enough to take showers, so I'm starting to question this practice. Should we each have our own?
I realize that this is to the left of the matter at hand, but I've spent more time than is normal or necessary contemplating how one loses a loofah. I'm sure the explanation has nothing on what my mind came up with, so let's move right along to a quick semantic point that, for the purpose of today's discussion, will be helpful. The term "loofah" has become a catchall to describe any sort of sponge-y thing that you scrub yourself with in the shower or bath, but let's make a further distinction between actual loofahs, which are natural sponges, and shower poufs, which are made of polyester mesh. The latter is what's being described here, and we're going to get into how to clean both kinds in just a sec.
First though, with semantics out of the way, we need to talk about the matter of personal choice in matters of hygiene. The question being asked today is about the practice of sharing a shower pouf, and I'm going to detail a whole bunch of reasons why this isn't a good thing to do. But it should be said that you may read all those reasons, shrug, and carry on sharing your shower pouf. To put it another way, what's gross or unthinkable to one person may not bother another person in the least.
With that said, I definitely think everyone should be using their own shower pouf (and washcloth, for that matter). On top of that, I think everyone needs to be cleaning and replacing their pouf more often.
Our Letter Writer offers a very common line of thinking for me to debunk, and I thank her greatly for the opportunity to tell you that your shower, even though it's the place you go to get clean, is incredibly filthy. It's a warm, wet environment—which means that the shower is a tremendously attractive home for bacteria like mildew, mold, and Serratia marcescens (that's the pink-ish/orange-ish stuff you may notice building up on grout, drains, and around the rim of the toilet bowl). That same bacteria that likes to take up residence along grout lines and in the folds of your shower curtain will also move itself right into your shower pouf or loofah.
And actually, your shower pouf offers extra incentive for all that bacteria to choose it as a place of residence: Even though you're rinsing it after use, it's still full of soap residue and a lot of dead skin.
The matter of dead skin buildup—and, let's be honest, probably some body hair—brings us nicely to back to the question of whether or not sharing a shower pouf among family members is OK to do. So look, it's not super likely that anything really bad is going to happen if you share your body scrubber. But something really bad could happen, in the form of bacteria getting into an open wound and causing an infection. They can also spread things like conjunctivitis. Why take the risk?
Beyond the potential to cause infection, sharing a ball of dead skin and loose hairs is just kind of… squickity. I know you know what I mean when I say that. Or maybe you don't! Which is why I went into that whole routine about personal choice vis-a-vis hygiene. Also, they're not terribly expensive and they don't take up much room, so I'd say go ahead and splurge on a pouf for each person using the shower. If you go this route, I'd suggest getting different colored poufs so everyone know which pouf belongs to which person.
You'll also want to wash them on a regular basis, just like you'd regularly launder towels and washcloths. In fact, you can toss poufs and sponges right in the laundry with those towels, which is pretty easy—just add those items to the things you're gathering up come wash day, and remember to pluck them out of the load before transferring items to the dryer (the heat of a dryer will be too much for them). In the case of loofahs, you may want to put them in a mesh washing bag so that they don't snag on whatever else is being washed. You can also clean poufs and loofahs in the microwave by wetting them and nuking them on medium for 30 to 60 seconds. They can also go in the dishwasher, on the top rack. Loofahs, but not poufs, can be boiled clean as well.
A good rule of thumb in terms of defining "regular cleaning" is every 2-4 weeks. You're probably like, Whoa right now because that seems so frequent, but remember how easy it is to clean them and also, if you think of a shower scrubber as being akin to a washcloth, which you would never use for two weeks straight without washing (uh, you wouldn't, right? Right.) the frequency makes a whole bunch more sense.
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