How To Take A Shower
Don’t laugh. But we may have cracked it.
by The Candidly Team
Sure, you know how to take a shower.
But.
Do you know how to take the best shower of your natural life?
Well. We do. The steps, in this order, are key. The products, essential. We spend over two thousand hours in the shower over the course of our lives.
We deserve to make those hours truly glorious.
Let’s go.
However, if you’d rather bypass this whole dumb list and just jump straight to the three most important products you need, go HERE.
Step One: Shampoo
It’s crucial that this is your first step. You’ll see why shortly. Actually, there’s something you should do BEFORE you step into the shower. But usually forget ourselves so we can’t in good conscience convince you it’s an essential step. But here’s what IS an essential step: and it’s these two, absolutely must-do elements of a truly excellent, effective shampoo:
1. Shampoo Twice. It makes such a difference in your scalp’s happiness. We use Jennifer Aniston’s favorite shampoo brush found HERE, brush the shampoo at the scalp, and repeat the whole process. Yes, every time we shower.
2. Shampoo ONLY your scalp. We’re so used to seeing those old commercials with giant, foaming heads full of Prell and Herbal Essence that we were all tricked into thinking that more lather meant more clean. But in fact, you just want to scrub the hell out of your scalp with shampoo and leave the strands out of it.
Below are a few of our favorite shamps and shamp-related things but for a truly psychotic opus that took us half our lives to research, go HERE.
Step Two: Conditioner
Even if your hair is a grease pit, you want to deep condition or do a hair mask or something in this ilk, while in the shower. These women on YouTube who have full-on “self-care days” where they have time to wear hair masks outside of the shower while giving themselves pedicures are……not us. We’re lucky if we can complete a shower without a dog/child/husband screeching our name to deal with some emergency like locating the ketchup because it’s “disappeared” when in fact it was “behind something.” So trust us here. Deep condition. And do it now. And THIS is why we shampoo first, so that we can very quickly slap on this product so it has maximum time to marinate and soak and give us the softest, silkiest strands of our wildest dreams.
Here’s some of our faves:
Step Three: Hair Removal
As we soften our head hair, now is the time to remove every other speck of hair from the rest of our bodies because we subscribe to a patriarchal standard that equates our femininity with pre-pubescent hairlessness! We’re kidding! But only sort of! Because little compares to slinking into bed after a long day with newly-washed sheets and freshly-shaven legs. We know you know this. So move to your shaving area of the shower to be sure your hair mask remains intact (or even use THIS if you want to get serious) and now we shave. Or epilate. Or trim. Or all of the above.
And before anything, you must exfoliate the HELL out of your legs for maximum, seal-like smoothness. We love THIS cheap scrub and THIS much less cheap scrub.
1. THIS is truly the only razor we love. With all our hearts.
2. THIS is the only epilator that doesn’t make us cry from pain.
3. And THIS is a surprisingly good trimmer that was invented for men’s nether regions, but works supremely well for quick, waterproof grooming.
Note: We hate almost all shaving creams. It dries our legs and almost creates nicks and cuts. We use cheap hair conditioner and/or body wash instead.
Step Four: All The Other Things
With our hair still masked, we now wash our face, since our pores are gloriously steamed and ready for a soothing, deep (triple) cleanse if you can manage it. And if you take literally one thing from this entire semi-unhinged list, let it be this: use THIS to wash your face. It’s a revelation.
We also now scrub and cleanse the rest of our bodies raw, because we want to feel like a polished beach pebble when we emerge from our shower. Sometimes we use our favorite FANCY scrub and body wash or we use our favorite AFFORDABLE scrub and body wash, and we always always always use some kind of body scrubber tool, again, for maximum softness. We have THIS which feels like we’re getting a full-on body massage in the shower (which is basically all we have ever wanted) but we also use THIS for more low-key quickie showers for those aforementioned ketchup emergencies.
Last Step: Freeze Yourself Clean
You hate hearing this. We know. We hate having to write it. But it’s very, very, very important. Cold showers can increase circulation, help itchy skin, and heighten our immune systems. But they ALSO make a world of difference as the very last step in your hair routine. Rinsing out your hair mask throughly using cold water, locks in moisture, and reduces frizz, and as a bunch of over 35 year olds behind the scenes, we are scrambling to find anything that helps our hair look…less weird/limp/frizzy/etc. Plus, once you’ve done it a few times, and noticed a glassier hair-sheen, you’ll almost love the ice-cold feeling. It CERTAINLY jumpstarts your morning. And if you’re an evening shower person (us too), we actually switch the temp back to warm once our hair is rinsed, and we inhale deeply using THIS lovely shower steamer. If you want to get fancy you can hang dried eucalyptus from your faucet, but we are not fancy. We are Amazon people. We are pragmatists. We are busy. And we are tired.
But we do want to enjoy those 8-17 minutes to ourselves in the shower, blessedly (hopefully) without interruption, so that we can have just a moment of peace, before we have to emerge, cleansed, smoothed, and scrubbed, into the long day ahead.
Rinse, and repeat.
At The Candidly, we try a lot of stuff so you don’t have to. We only recommend things we truly love, and that we think you’ll love, too. All products are chosen independently by our creative team, and all details reflect the price and availability of products at the time of publication. If you buy something we link to, The Candidly may earn a commission.
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