Should you or should you not be washing your legs? That is the question that has divided
households, broken friendships, destroyed relationships. But who is actually right?
Today we're throwing ourselves, and our employees, into the shower to find out
whether gravity can wash your legs for you. And the results may just change your life forever.
No way!
Hello Internet! Welcome to Style Theory. Since the dawn of mankind, we have asked ourselves the
biggest of questions. What is the meaning of life? Why doesn't Apple Jacks taste like Apple? And most
importantly of all, do we need to actually wash our legs? Now, this might seem like a ridiculous
question, but believe it or not, a 2019 Twitter poll revealed that 20% of people when they take
a shower, don't actually wash their legs. And we're not talking about a small sample
size here either. More than 600,000 people responded to this thing,
which means that 120,000 people who voted said no, they ain't touching their stanky legs. And
the more you look around the Internet, the more you see just how heated this discussion can get.
The general thought here is that the soaps and shampoos that you use on the top half of your
body run down over your legs, thereby cleaning you in the process. So instead of doing the awkward
naked bend over mooning-the-gods-above, you instead let gravity do all the work for you. But,
riddle me this theorists: of that 20% who said they don't wash their legs, would you
assume the voters in it skewed more male or female identifying? Leave the answer down in the comments
below right before you continue watching the video. No cheating. I will know if you cheat. I
have my ways. You done? Awesome. Well, if you were like me and were part of team “dudes are gross”,
get ready to have your world rocked. According to a follow up poll, 80.7% of men said that
they washed their legs. Women, 75.1%. More women skip washing their legs. That was shocking to me.
I think I need to apologize to all my fellow men out there for assuming the worst of you.
That said, this can’t actually work, can it? You guys know that we here at team theorist
are always looking for ways to save you money and ways to save you time. So if there is an optimized
way to actually shower and wash your body, then we are going to be here to test it. So with two weeks
left to go before our new H.R. manager joins the team, we decided we’d put this mystery to the test
and throw everyone in the shower. I swear this is a channel that's not going to get demonetized.
But before we start throwing team theorist under the old shower head, we decided,
you know, hey, let's actually learn a little bit about how soap can actually
clean our body. So we decided to bring in Theorist's own chemistry expert: Stephanie.
Hello. I thought that
there were going to be some parts of our life and house that didn't end up on one of these
channels. And boy, how wrong I was. Welcome to our actual, personal, room and bathroom.
In our most personal of spaces. You know, that doesn't mean that
we could write the square footage off of taxes at least at the end of the day.
Yeah, yeah, that's great.
Fun fact, actually. That's why the channels are what they are. It's not like optimization.
It's not about YouTube trends, things like that. It's literally like, “Hey,
I want to buy video games. That's a tax write off.”
And I really, I need some new shampoo. So let's start a style channel honestly.
Yeah, so let's just let everyone rampage through our bathroom and shower on camera.
Speaking of soap, it turns out that soap is a very special molecule in our lives called
a surfactant. It's sort of a… it's sort of a yin and yang, a little catdog, if you will.
Yin and yang, catdog. Man. Nothing like classic nicktoons to really compare.
Yeah, I know. All the other dyes,
the lotions, the perfume and stuff in your soap don't actually contribute to cleaning
your body. Just this one type of molecule does. A surfactant molecule has two sides,
an oily side and a watery side. We pretty much intuitively understand, most people,
that oil and water don't mix. But the thing is, you have oil on your skin. That's what
the dirt is. It's extra oil. It's extra, sort of greasy, gross buildup. It's awful stuff, actually.
We are disgusting creatures.
Yeah honestly. And you can't get all
of that oil off just by running water over it because oil and water don't mix. That's where
you need soap. So soap has its oily side that sticks to the oil on your skin and
really binds to it so it can actually get pulled off of your skin and washed away.
And then the watery side sticks to the water that's coming over your head from the shower,
and together it lifts the oil right off of your skin and washes it away right down the drain.
So soap is a really special molecule because it actually bridges the gap between two things
that should not go together at all. But one of the reasons why soap can make you
feel really dried out is that the oily end of those surfactant molecules is sticking so
well to the oil on your skin that it's actually pulling all of the oils off.
So most of the time, a lot of people end up putting some of it back on by putting on
lotion after your shower. If you think about it, bathing is not all that efficient of a process.
It's really interesting; when you break down the chemistry of this,
water is just kind of, like, there as a passenger. It's like the support.
Yeah, it just carries away the soap and the dirt. But you actually need
something else to remove the dirt from your body.
Drop that knowledge bomb next time you're in science class,
that’ll be amazi… you will blow your teacher's minds.
It's true, actually.
Anyway, you got to go get changed now. Yes, go.
Goodbye!
Which segues us nicely into the actual experiment. To get the cleanest results, pun definitely
intended, we had to account for a variety of variables. Now obviously we can't just
be showering on camera sans covering, that one's for the onlyfans, so our dress code for
the day was shorts and short sleeves to try and leave as much skin exposed as possible.
This then would allow the water and soap to drip down our bods naturally and freely wash away as
much dirt as it normally would. Speaking of dirt, our mess for the day was a heavy
oil based coffee scrub, less likely to destroy our plumbing, and also a perfect way to ensure
that everyone's legs were equally dirty. We also made sure to all use the same soaps,
shampoos and conditioners to keep the chemistry as consistent across the board as possible.
No additional variables here, scientific method eat your heart out. Everyone was told to keep
their shower to 10 minutes and to ensure that we were accounting for different shower habits.
Each tester was told to conduct their normal shower routine as if they weren't on camera
for a million viewers, no pressure there. The only change that we made to their shower routines was
asking them to scrub one leg and not the other. That way we could get a visual and tactile
comparison between the two immediately after turning the water off. Fun fact, this experiment
led me to find out that when it comes to the leg washing, team theorist was very pro scrubbing
across the board, not a gravity user in the house. Oh, and that does remind me of the one
variable I haven't talked about yet: Body hair. Obviously, there's just a natural difference
between hairy legs and shaved legs that might play into all of this. Right? So we decided to
get as large of a sample size as possible across Team Theorist. So let's bring out a
couple of our brave volunteers, shall we? Showing up again on the Style Theory Channel: It’s Amy
Hello.
And then representing the hairy leg is Sam.
Wait, I'm not the hairy leg?
I have not checked recently, but I'll let you make the judgment call for yourself.
Do you want me to hold your leg?
Do you want to?
Okay, so look. There it is. Hairy leg. When was the last time you shaved your legs?
How old am I? 25? Never.
OK, never. Amy, you have been with the channels for a long time.
Is this the weirdest thing that we've asked you to do?
It's getting really close, but I still think making me lick Tootsie Pops on the internet,
that will be there forever, is probably the weirdest so far.
Sam, you're one of the new remembers the team.
Yeah. Say hi to everyone
What is one fact that everyone should know about you that'll be your defining
character trait from here until the time you leave this company?
When I was in elementary school, I was nationally ranked at Guitar Hero.
That is awesome actually
Yep.
Can you do Through the Fire and Flames?
On expert with my eyes closed. Woah!
Instead of ever leaving my house or making friends, I played Guitar Hero.
Is this what you thought you were signing up for? When you're like,
Yeah, I'm going to accept that job offer at Team Theorist.
I don't think I ever expected the day where you would walk out and be like,
What are your thoughts on getting in my shower on camera?
I will say it is proving to be a consistent career path.
What do you mean It's been a consistent career path?
Because Sam has my old job, and this is where I ended up.
This is not looking good. Hey. Okay, great. You guys, get out of here. Get out of here room.
Let's, let's move on to the experiment. After getting changed into my
monetization-friendly wetsuit, it was time to get dirty using our dirt-dujour. First up,
we had our brave volunteers, Amy and Sam. Right away we noticed a big difference between someone
with hairy legs versus someone with smooth legs. The scrub clung to Sam's hairy legs like Velcro.
While it had a harder time sticking to Amy's shaved legs. The dirt just had less to hold
on to. Maybe this is why in the poll that we mentioned earlier, women admitted to washing
their legs slightly less than men. Many women shave their legs, so maybe they assume that
the shaving is also soaping up their legs, removing a dirty layer of skin, or just that
there's less hair for the dirt to adhere to. So while Steph and I mourned the state of
our bathroom floor, Amy and Sam were ready to enter the shower.
Now a quick note about the shower setup. Showers typically come with
either a diagonal or overhead nozzle. In our bathroom, we have a rainfall shower,
meaning that the water is falling from directly above the tester's head down onto their body.
Keep this one in mind. We're going to come back to it later. But for now, back to the bathroom
where Steph and I were waiting outside in a totally work appropriate, totally non creepy way.
We are the peanut gallery peeking in on our employees as they take showers.
Oh this is… this is going so wrong in so many ways today.
Meanwhile, keep in time we had Josiah,
a new member of Team Theorist who struggled to understand how timers work.
That's it. Just automatically starts. It's a preschooler clock. We literally,
we bought it for Ollie.
You just turn it and starts. It is going as we speak
[Steph]: Is it at ten?
[Josiah]: It is at 10
[Steph]: That's one the numbers one and zero are on there.
[Amy]: We are running out of time!
Let’s go!
That's the man who's responsible for tracking our analytics. We know how to
pick them. After Josiah got himself a quick lesson in preschool friendly analog clocks,
we were ready to dive back into the science of the day. We, ah,
forgot to let the water warm up. So Amy and Sam got treated to a surprise.
But the time is running!
Oops. Sorry, guys.
Maybe there was a reason I had you go first. Now, right away, we noticed some interesting
differences. Sam was a face to the wall kind of guy with very little rotation under the
shower head. While Amy, with her noticeably longer hair, had to keep her back to the
shower in order to get the head fully wet. We also got a bit of an insight into Sam's
hair care knowledge, which was zero.
Um, based on the fact that I didn't know double shampooing was a thing,
I'm going to say one shampoo.
Well, Sam, that's why you wash, rinse and repeat.
Yeah, that's the repeat part.
Which, honestly, is a Style Theory for another day. Does it actually do anything?
Yeah. Does the double wash do anything? Because I used to never double wash. And
I really just adopted the double wash probably a couple of years ago. Where the first wash,
it doesn't really suds up as much and it feels like you're just getting like the
surface level grime out and then the second wash you're really able to get in there.
Already you could start to see that shower technique was going to be completely different for
different people. Amy and Steph both classified themselves as double shampoo washers. Sam and I,
we are single lather bros. In fact, truth be told, most of the time I'm not even using conditioner.
I think that stuff is useless. You are just making your head greasy and then washing it
all off again. Just resetting you back to where you began in the first place. There I said it.
Go ahead and roast me in the comments. You can't make me use it. Anyway, the additional round of
shampooing meant that Amy and Steph would have more soap coming down their legs over
the course of their shower than either Sam or I, which might have resulted in cleaner legs.
We'll just have to wait and see the results here at the end. For now, I want you to focus on the
super impressive lather that Sam's got going on. Maybe this is why he doesn't need a second round
of shampoo. He literally has Mickey Mouse glove levels of suds happening there. Honestly, I think
I just need to step up my shampoo game after this. Even though our testers were taking the most
modest shower ever, they did try to recreate everything as accurately as they could so the
soap would run down their legs naturally. And we can see even now that before either Sam or Amy
got to actually scrubbing, a lot of the dirt was already being washed away by the combination of
soap and water, something I did not expect to see so soon. And that wasn't the only thing blowing
my mind. According to Amy, shower time also meant it was time to rock out like she was at a concert.
Is that really something that you just do in the shower?
Yup!
She's like a head banging in there.
I mean, it seems like a party. I like it
It’s like a concert, I feel like I'm giving myself brain damage doing this.
After throwing my neck out emo style, it was finally time for the leg action. Amy
went for using the bar of soap alone, then followed it up with a washcloth.
While Sam put soap on a cloth first and then use that to scrub a dub dub.
With the 10 minutes up it was then time to see how well we did. As a reminder,
this is how their legs looked pre shower and these are the results post shower. Theorists, you know
I'm always honest with you. I didn't expect this one to work at all. I thought for sure we were
going to debunk the whole gravity wash thing. And while yeah, you can still visibly see some dirt
remaining on both of Sam's and Amy's unscrubbed left legs. It is so much cleaner than any of
us expected it would be. But that's just what we saw. Do their left legs actually feel as clean as
their right legs? After getting verbal consent, Steph and I went in for a closer inspection.
Very clean feeling, like extremely clean, not oily at all. This side, Oh,
definitely slipperier. Like there's definitely, like, oil still on the leg, but visibly, honestly,
like very little coffee remnant. I would say actually, gravity did a pretty great job.
And we found the same results for Sam. You can tell right away. Obviously very clean.
You did a very thorough job. I saw you getting in there with the scrub. Meanwhile, over here you can
definitely see a lot of the visible coffee grounds still apart and kind of like nestled in the leg.
And actually you can see, I think, where the line of water is that naturally goes
down the body. Right? So there, it looks like there was a stream of water that cut here and
washed this area of the calf off really well, but actually left this patchy spot over here
because that's not that wasn't like the direct path of water in like a stream down the leg.
And here theorists was the moment we stumbled upon the key to our soap leg experiment,
shower technique. How you stand, move and interact with the shower environment.
Like we learned earlier, soap can separate the dirt from your skin,
but without the water to act as transportation, that soapy dirt mixture is just going to stay on
your body. So how you stand and move under the shower head actually matters a lot.
If the water isn't running over a part of your body, the grime ain't going to be going anywhere.
But this was only one set of data. And here at Team Theorists, we are nothing if not thorough
in making sure that we have a clean set of data to work with. It was time for round 2.
We give it a go?
I think it's time for Steph and I to put our legs where our mouths are.
This episode gets worse and worse.
But first it's time for you to hop on over to hit that subscribe button. If you enjoy seeing
us put ourselves in weird situations for your entertainment and education,
then you're going to want to stick around because we have a ton of live
action testing planned for Style Theory. By subscribing, you're making sure that our
future uploads make it in front of your eyeballs and aren't just getting washed
away down the drain of the algorithm. All right, hit that subscribe button?
Thank you. Time to get back to the shower. Steph and I slathered on our questionable scrub.
[Steph]: It looks like poop.
And made sure we had ourselves a well-balanced coating of goo.
Does this look even?
You're missing one big lob right there.
*everyone laughs*
Does this look even? Womp womp
We were ready for the water, with me representing team hairy leg and Steph stepping up to bat for
the hairless leg. Now that we knew to pay close attention to how the water flowed down our bodies,
we were hyper aware of our natural shower stances and habits. Turns out I'm a pivoter.
I'm also a soap to the body man. Look at that soap-to-skin action. Stephanie,
on the other hand, was a twirle;r spinning the soap in her hand to gather a bunch of suds and
then using it to wash her leg. That's also not the only Steph pro strat that I want to shout
out here. Take a look at her shower stance. What I'm going to call the TSA pat down.
I think I'm the only weirdo who literally stands like
they're being held at gunpoint in the shower for like long periods of time.
Honestly, Stephanie is the hygiene influencer we didn't deserve,
but we needed. And with that our showers were done. So it was time to see if our
results supported what we learned from the first test. Here are our legs pre
shower and here they are post wash. Once again, gravity stepped up to do the job.
Perfectly clean on both sides like I'm actually surprised the only residue I
see is right here. Vaguely. Just a little bit more oil slick. but just a tiny bit.
[Steph]: This is remarkably effective.
And once again, we saw the same thing with my legs. I did have a tiny bit of
dirt residue on my unscrubbed leg, that had it been the leg that I normally kept
under the water and my pivot stance, I am certain it would have been completely clean
I guess I'm very uneven in my washing,
which is interesting. I didn't really realize that until literally today.
Let's take a look one more time at all the before and afters for each of our test subjects. In each
test, we can clearly see that the difference between the washed and unwashed leg was slim.
This is one of those episodes that I love from our channels where I went in fully expecting gravity
to be completely debunked. I'm like, There is no way that not washing your legs is going to help
get them clean. No way! And yet here we are. And I mean, like, there's a slight difference,
but it is so slight. It is crazy! It is so much closer than I would have ever anticipated.
So there you have it. We've proved it. I am shocked to see this, but you do not have to
wash your legs in the shower. That said, there was one last variable that we had to test.
So we've looked at hairy legs, we've looked at smooth legs, we've looked at shower time,
we've looked at different showering techniques. The one thing we haven't looked at yet, though,
is shower type. So obviously, all of these showers, all of these initial tests are
with rainfall showers. So the water is just literally pouring right down over your head.
The question is, though, a lot of people have the kind of diagonal showers; the shower head.
So we have one other special guest who's going to have to shower all alone. Josiah?
[Amy]: Josiah.
What a team player.
So here I am down in the basement. To be honest, I was really looking forward to trying out the
rainfall shower. Never done that before, but still not going to try it. So let's do the diagonal.
So… wow.
I've never used this shower before, so this is a worthwhile experiment.
Turns out, you know, I thought we had better water pressure down
here. We got another shower. He deserves better. What a champ! What a POGchamp!
Yeah!
After that disaster of an attempt, we were actually ready for our final test. And
Josiah was so happy to have himself a working shower, he was literally singing with joy.
~Take me out to the ball game, take me out~
Beautiful Josiah. Please don't leave us for Broadway when they come calling. Josiah
scrubbed it down doing a double shampoo wash and went to town with his washcloth. Suddenly
I felt seen. I was not alone in my shower pivot technique. Josiah was a pivoter too! 10 minutes
later, we had ourselves our final results. And I got to say the before and after doesn't
lie here Theorists. The diagonal showerhead did a less efficient job of cleaning with
gravity alone. Josiah was left with the most dirt residue out of any of the tests,
despite the only changing factor being the angle of the showerhead. The fact that water was only
hitting one side of his leg and not washing over him would seemed to make a huge difference. So,
what does this mean for the debate of washing your legs versus not washing your legs? It turns
out that science is almost as good at getting you clean as doing it by hand, provided you've gotten
yourself the right water flow. When you have a direct overhead stream of water and keep a
constant rotation of your body under it, making sure that the water is getting to every bit of
your skin. Well, then you can probably get away without scrubbing your legs. That said,
if you have a diagonal shower head, that means the flow of water under your body is uneven and you're
going to have to give in and grab a loofah to get the job done. So all you gravity naysayers out
there are going to have to take a seat the next time someone tells you they don't wash their legs.
Gravity can in fact work, thereby saving you soap and time in the shower. That said to all my non
leg washers out there, a good scrub every now and then, it'll probably do you good. It'll help
remove dead skin cells and avoid ingrown hairs by exfoliating your skin. And if you get really
dirty, like rolling around in mud or getting sprayed by a skunk, do us all a favor and scrub.
But, hey, that's just a theory. A STYLE THEORY! Keep looking sharp.