Everything showers are a nightmare When daily hygiene turns into aesthetic burnout

I work at least five days a week. I have deadlines, bills to pay, a pantry that empties at an alarming rate, and a computer that overheats like a vintage toaster. My phone is perpetually half-dead because in the meantime I’m listening to playlists, podcasts, or rewatching old shows while doing something else. My beauty routine? Essential. Stripped down to the bone. Almost monastic. In the morning, if I manage to get out of bed, wash up, cleanse my face, and apply two actives and a moisturizer, I already consider myself a functional person. Makeup? A bit of foundation and concealer only if I have to see other human beings, an event that, thankfully, does not happen every day. Evening is worse. By five o’clock my vital energy is already abandoning me. Between dinner, the dishwasher, and the desperate attempt to prevent the house from looking like the battlefield left behind by Attila and the Huns, the idea of embarking on a forty-minute Everything Shower feels less like a self-care ritual and more like a Himalayan expedition. And yet, according to the internet, that’s exactly what I should be doing if I truly want to take care of myself.

The seductive promise of the Everything Shower

On paper, the Everything Shower is a beautiful idea. A complete body-care ritual, a small home spa where you concentrate all those gestures we normally spread across weeks: body scrubs, hair treatments, shaving, masks, nourishing oils, exfoliation, deep hydration. A total reset, both physical and mental. A pause in the chaos of contemporary life. In its original form it was meant as an occasional treat to repeat the evening before a vacation, an important date, or simply when you feel the need to dedicate more time to yourself. Then TikTok arrived. And suddenly the Everything Shower turned into something completely different. Now it’s a performance. A ritual to film, edit, and explain step by step. Part one, part two, part three. Candle lit. Dry brushing. Scalp oil. Double exfoliation. Three different cleansers. Hair mask. Full shaving. And we’re only halfway through.

The shower is officially out of control

The point is that the Everything Shower has no limits. There’s no maximum number of steps. The longer the routine, the more complete it seems. The more complete it is, the more it becomes perfect content for the infinite machinery of social media. So the bathroom slowly turns into a cosmetic assembly line. Before the shower there are preparatory rituals: hair oiling, scalp massages, dry brushing, dermaplaning, gentle peels. During the shower come multiple shampoos, conditioners, scrubs, body washes, strategic shaving, and masks left to process everywhere, from your butt to your hair. After the shower comes the third act: lotions, oils, gua sha, ice rollers, serums, perfumes. No one skips a spritz, even if they’re about to go to bed, just in case shower gels, soaps, conditioners, and creams haven’t already left you smelling pleasant enough. The result is a beauty routine that can easily take forty-five minutes or more. At a certain point the question becomes inevitable: when exactly did simple daily hygiene turn into a ten-plus-step event that requires almost as much energy as a cardio workout? The answer, as often happens, is a cocktail of factors ranging from social-media aesthetics to beauty marketing to a certain contemporary obsession with perfect self-care.

When self-care becomes overconsumption

The idea of taking care of oneself has become one of the major narratives of our time. But in its digital version it often coincides with something very simple: buying products. The Everything Shower is paradise for beauty marketing. Every phase requires something: a specific scrub, a dedicated cleanser, a targeted mask, a brush, an oil for a precise area of the body. The bathroom becomes a showroom. Shelves fill up with minimalist bottles, purely aesthetic accessories, and products you don’t really need, from Korean shower filters to expensive, hyper-technological facial cleansing devices. The more products you have, the more you look like someone who takes care of themselves. At some point, though, that idea of relaxation slowly turns into a checklist. A list of steps to complete. Body care becomes a task. And so instead of feeling relaxed, you feel tired.

Aesthetic burnout

In recent months there’s been a subtle but noticeable shift. In beauty forums, on subreddits, even in chats among friends, a new feeling has started to appear, something many people call aesthetic burnout. People are tired of endless routines. Tired of perfect shelves. Or worse, shelves that look artfully messy. They’re tired of the idea that every daily gesture has to become an aesthetic ritual to optimize. The questions that start circulating sound like this: “Do I really need three face masks?” “Do I really have to steam my pores on Wednesday and do the Everything Shower on Friday?”. For many, the answer is slowly becoming no. Not because self-care is wrong. But because real life doesn’t work like a TikTok tutorial.

The dermatology perspective

Meanwhile, dermatologists observe the trend with a certain scientific caution. From a skin-health perspective, long and repeated showers are not necessarily a good idea. Staying under hot water for more than twenty minutes can compromise the skin barrier, removing the natural lipids that protect the skin. The result? Dryness, irritation, redness, and in some cases worsening of conditions such as eczema or dermatitis. Excessive use of cleansers, scrubs, and exfoliating products can also alter the skin microbiome, that balance of beneficial bacteria that helps protect the skin. For most people, the ideal shower lasts between five and ten minutes. The rest is choreography.

Water: the invisible cost of the Everything Shower

There’s one detail that rarely appears in glossy TikTok videos. Water. A twenty-minute shower can consume up to 180 liters. On an individual scale it’s not a tragedy, of course, but when millions of people extend the duration of their showers, the balance becomes less insignificant. In an era when climate change is increasingly tangible, and even digital infrastructures such as artificial-intelligence data centers consume enormous amounts of water, the daily Everything Shower suddenly looks a little less innocent. Shortening your shower won’t save the planet. But it’s one of those small gestures that reminds us how easily, in the name of self-care, we can ignore the broader context we live in.

Between the Everything Shower and celebrity no-wash

As often happens with contemporary trends, one hyper-ritualized extreme is almost inevitably followed by the opposite rebellion. If on one side we have the endless liturgy of the Everything Shower, on the other a far more spartan movement is emerging, what we might call, with a touch of irony, the no-wash philosophy. In recent years several celebrities have publicly described hygiene habits that are far less zealous than the glamorous imagination might suggest. Some say they don’t shower every day. Others candidly admit they rely on the oldest biological sensor of all: smell. If you start noticing a certain aroma… it’s probably time for a shower, as Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard have suggested. Otherwise, it can wait. The most cited case is Brad Pitt, who according to Angelina Jolie “smells like a shepherd dog” and who, for ecological reasons, would often prefer wet wipes to a shower. Not exactly the icon of the perfect beauty routine. These confessions have fueled a small cultural counter-narrative that questions the idea that body care must necessarily coincide with near-obsessive hygiene. So the pendulum swings happily between two almost caricatured extremes: on one side the forty-five-minute Everything Shower, on the other the philosophy of “wash when necessary.” The truth, as always, probably lies somewhere in the middle. 

The radical luxury of simplicity

In the end, the shower remains one of the most personal rituals that exist. Habits change depending on climate, lifestyle, hair, culture. Even I sometimes like to indulge in a longer version of my beauty routine: exfoliating my skin, applying a mask, shaving slowly, using oils and creams with the patience I normally don’t have. At the end I’m tired, yes. But also satisfied. The difference is that it happens occasionally. Not every day. Because the truth is surprisingly simple: the perfect shower doesn’t need twenty steps. Hot water. A good cleanser. An effective shampoo. And maybe ten minutes of silence. Or better yet, a playlist that heals your soul. Everything else, the endless routines, the perfect shelves, the forty-five-minute Everything Showers, belongs mostly to the attention economy. Real life is elsewhere. In complicated days, messy homes, tired people who just want a quick shower before going to bed. And, surprisingly, you can be perfectly clean there too.