Week 2 Lecture: Personal Hygiene and Maintenance

Why frequency beats intention, a real maintenance calendar, and what "good enough" looks like

Open the slides

Introduction#

A fridge shelf, photographed monthly for a semester, holds condiments and one ageing lime — nothing that constitutes a meal. It will come back in weeks 4 and 10. This week’s scope is narrower: showering, hair washing, deodorant, laundry frequency, and skincare only. Each one gets a concrete routine to run, not just a definition of what it is. It’s the most immediately fixable topic in the course.

Definitions#

Shower (noun)

a fixture or enclosure in which a person stands to wash the body using a controlled spray of water, typically once per calendar day.

Deodorant (noun)

a substance applied to the underarms to reduce detectable odour, typically reapplied daily.

Laundry (noun, uncountable)

clothing and linens requiring washing — also, the act of washing them, ideally before the pile is visible from the doorway.

Haircut (noun)

a scheduled trim of head hair, recommended at an interval measured in weeks, not academic semesters.

Skincare (noun)

the practice of maintaining and improving the health, barrier function, and appearance of the skin.

Body#

• Frequency, not intention. Aiello, A. E., Coulborn, R. M., Perez, V., & Larson, E. L. (2008) found improved hand hygiene reduced gastrointestinal illness by 31% and respiratory illness by 21% across 30 pooled studies — a large effect from a routine, not from wanting it more.

Check-in: If washing your hands more often cuts your odds of getting sick by a fifth to a third, what does that suggest about the rest of this list?

• Anchoring the daily basics. Shower once a day, in the same slot as something you already do without deciding — right after waking, or right before bed — so it stops being a fresh decision each time. Apply deodorant straight after, to dry skin, before getting dressed; wet skin means it wipes off on the towel instead of doing anything. For haircuts, book the next appointment on the day of the last one, or set a standing reminder every four to six weeks — decide the interval once, not every time it starts looking long.

Check-in: Which of shower, deodorant, or haircut currently has no fixed time or interval attached to it?

• The laundry pile as a schedule, not a personality trait. Twenty-three unpaired socks, collected from under a bed, a desk, and the back seat of a car, are proof that laundry got deferred past the point a matching pair survived — not proof of a character flaw. Week 12 returns to this exact pile. A schedule fixes the pile; keeping colours separate on wash day — whites in one load, everything else in another — fixes the pink towel that colours the whole load.

Check-in: Is your current laundry pile a schedule, or an event that happens to you?

• A skincare routine, step by step. Cleanse the face once in the morning and once at night, with a cleanser meant for skin rather than the bar soap from the shower. Moisturise straight after, while the face is still damp — this is what actually stops the tight, dry feeling, not the cleanser. In the morning only, finish with a sunscreen of at least SPF 30, on cloudy days too. Cleanse twice a day, moisturise twice a day, SPF once a day: three products, in that order, done in under five minutes.

Check-in: Of the three skincare steps, which one is most often the one people skip?

• What “good enough” looks like. Assignment 1 marks a hygiene product selection (40%) on whether you can state why you chose each product over the alternatives on the shelf, three outfit photos (40%) on whether each is actually appropriate for its occasion — lecture, birthday party, gym — and a written justification (20%) tying each outfit back to that occasion. None of it asks for a flawless routine, just one that survives a bad week and can defend its own choices.

Check-in: What's the smallest version of your routine that still counts as done?

In-lecture activity#

Conclusion#

A schedule beats a feeling — this is the cheapest topic in the course to fix, and it compounds. Shower, deodorant, laundry, haircuts, and skincare each now have a fixed time or interval attached, not just a definition — you have a real calendar template, not just an intention. Coming up: this week’s lab (the Maintenance Calendar).

This week’s reflection, due 12:00 Tuesday of week 3: describe what actually went wrong with your hygiene routine this week — not the routine you intend to run, the one that actually happened — and name the smallest change that would have prevented it.