Take a bath, stinky
Friendly reminder: pee after you bathe to decrease your risk of a UTI. I'm not a health professional, I'm a moron with a bathtub. Make sure to read the ingredients of any bath products you buy if you happen to have sensitivities to avoid getting something that may cause a reaction. All else fails, ask your doctor. Don't take health advice from some rando online. I also don't subscribe to any holistic healing or metaphysical property stuff so it'll mainly just be some variation of me repeating myself going "yup this smell good yup yup 👍"
In my "taking on stuff that I missed as a kid" ventures, I've found myself very fond of baths. So much so that I've played around with stuff enough to make a designated webpage on my website about it.
///Oh man, that sounds really bad typing it lololol (what do you mean you don't bathe???). I bathed as a kid but since I was like 8 or 9 I've always been a devout showerer - growing up a chronic sleep-in-er, I had no other choice waking up in the morning as a greasy teen full of body odor and sweat every morning. I got that shit locked down like a fucking art: if I needed to shower quickly, I could get myself clean in five minutes or less. It wasn't something to be enjoyed, it was just something you do so kids wouldn't have yet another thing to bully you about.
I almost prided myself on how relatively spartan my shower workflow was, at least compared to other girlies my age: get in, shampoo and rinse hair, plop conditioner on the mid to ends, wash body, rinse hair, leave. That's not to say I dislike showering now that I'm on that unwindset - sometimes you gotta cut the crap and just wash! - but my bathtime ventures have made me come to appreciate sitting the fuck down in some hot water for a while.
I started taking more baths as an adult when I caught COVID in January. I was stupid achy, and snotty as fuck. And my girlfriend tells me, "Bee, you gotta go take an epsom salt bath, you'll feel better". So I did - we got together, started filling the tub fulla water, and plopped a scoop of epsom salt into the hot water and swished it around until it became homogenous. I parked my fat ass in the tub, my girlfriend rolled up a hand towel into a makeshift neck pillow, and I sat back. And lo and behold, I started to feel a little better, in the mental and emotional departments at least. I can't vouch for the efficacy of making my body actually ache less, but I can vouch for the efficacy of "me enjoy bath actually wtf". Like, I know my mom takes hot baths to help ease the pains of her arthritis and lupus - I'm not actually sure if it does anything, but she still takes them anyway because she simply enjoys them.
But, like, I'dunno, something about sitting in a bathtub filled with hot funny water kinda made me realize that hey, it is relaxing. It takes my mind off things. It's nice. I eventually bought some bath bombs from Fry's, then later, from LUSH, and now I have an addiction to rival my spending back when I played Destiny 2. I now take a bath about once a week and shower any other time - sometimes with funny bath items, sometimes just as is.
I made this webpage to talk about the stuff I've used, and my thoughts on them. For now, it's only stuff from the grocery and from LUSH but at some point I'd like to try and buy from indie shops and maybe give making my own a go someday. My core expectations I look out for are the experiences themselves and their longevity (i.e. is this a single use item, or can this be reused). I hope you enjoy and perhaps learn something new! :)
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