I visited Korea earlier this year after my trip to India. After spending weeks in India without reliable showering I was very overdue for a hot bath and a haircut. Korea has a public bathhouse culture which is SO weird when you visit post-Americanization but I’ve kinda gotten over that weirdness (which is wild if you think about it; I was used to it first, then it got weird, then I got used to it again). I asked my dad to take me to the bathhouse for some deep cleaning and the next day we got a haircut appointment.
Oh man, was I fucking filthy. Do you know about Korean scrubs? We like to exfoliate manually using a really harsh fabric and rubbing it back and forth along our skin. Yes, it hurts but when you 1) actually see the layers of dead skin and 2) wash & hydrate to walk out of the bathhouse feeling like a baby, you kinda get hooked to it. My exfoliation was crazy this time, like the entire layer of dead skin was colored earth-tone and each stroke revealed my natural skin color. Crazy!
I have a funny unrelated story related to that exfoliating harsh fabric. I don’t know why but Koreans refer to that fabric as “Italy Towel”, and yes it literally means fabric from Italy. No idea why. I knew that this was a cultural misnomer and it had nothing to do with Italy, and moreover there was no way you were going to get this outside of Korea.
Before I graduated high school I was hanging out with a friend named David and David told me he had to go to target to buy something, and then we’ll hang out some more. So we went to Target and David called an employee and asked her, “Hey where do you guys have the Italian Towel?” and I was just cracking up inside because the lady was so confused by this question.
Furthermore, because the lady didn’t understand what Italian Towels were, she asked him to describe it and David went on to say something along the lines of “something like sandpaper so you can peel off your skin”, basically what I told you above in much harsher terms. The lady was mortified but eventually led David to the aisle containing loofahs, much to the disappointment of David.
Anyhow, back to my original story. After the bath I got a haircut from a local hairdresser and she told me something interesting: I should be shampooing my hair twice. My scalp is very oily and it doesn’t wash that well after one shampoo, she could tell. And this was very convincing to me because you know what? I’m a very greasy guy. My wife always complains about how greasy I am, and I need to wipe my face every once in a while throughout the day to de-grease myself. Maybe this was the remedy I needed.
So since that haircut I’ve been shampooing myself twice. I also washed my face twice, and used body soap twice. Voila! I noted so much difference in the greasiness, and I loved this feeling of softness! What a life! Randomly go to a haircut in Korea and change my life!
Then fast forward a few months… I start having this weird stink in my body that I can’t trace back to anything. You know what though, I sweat a LOT in jiu jitsu and many of my jiu jitsu gear is old so perhaps it’s the residual stink from that. But I would have days or weeks without training and the stink still remains. Hmm, what gives?
My wife one day noticed it and she was very repulsed by the smell, and you know how you can’t really smell your own BO? I smelled mine, so how bad would it have been for her? We found that it is coming the strongest from the scalp, we did this entire body smell test. What gives? What was wrong with my head?
Turns out, your body needs SOME amount of oil to keep the healthy bacterials on your skin functional. It’s like bacterial vaginosis; when a woman showers too much, the pH balance in the vagina can be disrupted to lead to an infection. That was basically happening to me. I have a version of a yeast infection on my scalp.
But as I told you, I did EVERYTHING twice… Which means my body became a fungi party. My entire body! Scalp! Face! Pits! Everywhere! Medical shampoo didn’t help because I had it in my ENTIRE BODY, not just the surface of the scalp!
Moreover, the fungi in me thrives with the nutrition I provide it — and its top 3 loves: flour, sugar, and mushrooms. Did I mention to you I’ve been super into baking recently? -_-
Without my knowledge I’ve been growing an entire petri dish in my body. It’s not infectious, it just stanks. I’m soon to pick up some medication and I’ve cut out all flour, sugar, and mushrooms from my diet for the last week or so and my smell is getting better.
The moral of the story today is, not everything that’s bad is all bad and not everything that’s good is all good. Things in moderation and balance, everyone.
(When I was in high school my AP bio teacher called some jokester in the class a fungi, and as I’m contemplating the fungi on my body I just remembered that. So hence the title)