Are shampoo and other products bad for us?

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/this-cult-of-cleanliness-is-a-deadly-racket-70pm30ffj?utm_source=FBPAGE&utm_medium=social_Unspecified&UTMX=:The%20Times%20&%20The%20Sunday%20Times:Unspecified:Unspecified:

Not sure the link works so here is the whole article if anyone can be bothered to read it all.:

Shampoo,” said our headline yesterday, “as bad a health risk as car fumes”. The Times science editor Tom Whipple explained that shampoo and a range of domestic cleaning products as well as paint, pesticides and perfumes “degrade into particles known as PM2.5 which cause respiratory problems and are implicated in 29,000 premature deaths each year in the UK”. His report noted that according to some recent research, professional cleaning staff suffered a decline in lung function comparable to that seen in regular smokers.
To corporate tills, a bottle of shampoo is the gift that keeps on giving
Not every health scare story deserves the front page but this one did. Our age has an obsession with washing and cleaning things, starting with our own bodies. This owes more to a mild form of collective mental illness than it does to hard-nosed medical science. That Times report also mentioned personal deodorants. Except in emergencies I have never used these. It always struck me — on the basis of precaution rather than medical expertise — that anything potent enough to block your pores and destroy the body flora that give scent to our perspiration must be pretty strong stuff. We are unlikely to have a perfect knowledge of the possible collateral damage.
It must be about 25 years since I stopped using shampoo. I have a much cleverer brother with a background in the sciences who had explained to me how to the corporate till shampoo is the gift that keeps on giving. Like nicotine it creates its own demand. A liquified, tinted and perfumed version of washing powder, shampoo strips the scalp of its natural oils. These lend heat-insulating and water-resistant properties to creatures’ fur or feathers. Sebaceous glands in a just-shampooed human scalp register the stripping of oils, then panic and pump out emergency supplies; your hair gets greasy faster and you reach for the shampoo again next morning.
My brother pointed out that animals do not use shampoo, yet when did you last see a rabbit with a greasy hair problem? So, on a South American expedition where we didn’t need to look our best, I stopped shampooing. For many days my hair got greasier. Then, washed with warm water alone, it started becoming less greasy. Everything stabilised — and has been stable ever since. After that I hardly ever used shampoo; my hair lost the artificial shine that shampoo does impart but has never been greasy, and I get far less dandruff than before
The Australian journalist Richard Glover, meanwhile, has attracted a sizeable Antipodean “no ’poo” cult. Shampoo manufacturers became alarmed. I started receiving from claimed experts unsolicited dossiers of photographic evidence (through microscopy) that fewer dust particles lodge in detergent-washed hair than in hair washed only in water. That of course is obvious: if you stripped your body of all natural oils then less dust would stick to it. Your skin would also fall off.
The cleaning and cosmetics industries are worried with good reason. Globally they rake in hundreds of billions of dollars, and a handful of huge companies dominate a notably small field. The UK cosmetics business has a market value of more than £9 billion. Aware that they could be more seriously targeted by environmentalists than has yet happened, their industry body runs a website, thefactsabout.co.uk, encouraging visitors to “sort out which are myths or scares”. The site’s tone is a blend of the helpful and the defensive. They have a lot to protect, employing some 200,000 people within British cosmetics alone.
Most cleaning and cosmetic products are retailed in disposable plastic containers, the rest in disposable glass. And for all of them, the tills just keep on ringing while the plastics are washed out to sea.
The Colman family used to joke that the family fortune rested on the mustard left on the side of the plate after dinner; but the cleaning and cosmetics industries are wise to keep quiet about the comparable boast. Not only do most consumers grotesquely overuse the bleaches, disinfectants, de-greasers, detergent gels, scouring pastes (toothpaste), ammonias, chlorines and chemical-based dyes and perfumes that constitute the house-cleaning, body-washing, disinfecting industry, as well as the creams and cosmetics used (as the 18th-century Spectator editor Joseph Addison put it) “to adorn that part of the head which we generally call the outside” but they discard, wash or wipe away most of the product, unused. Shower gel is the most egregious example. Most of it, perfume, dye, detergent and all, goes straight down the plughole. What genius on the part of the bodywashing industry so to dilute the core product (detergent) that it slips through the consumer’s fingers and is washed away.
At a friend’s house recently, and with the slightest of colds giving me a slightly raw throat, I emerged from the bathroom as from a First World War trench, choking on chlorine gas. “It’s my husband,” said my friend. “He puts half a bottle of household bleach down the loo every day, ‘to kill germs’ he says.” This is the gas, but in lower concentrations, that exterminated troops in 1914-1918.
Freudian theory may be all over the place, but at its core lie some vast intuitive truths. Since long before Lady Macbeth’s compulsive sleepwalking hand-washing movements we have half-sensed the unconscious connection between guilt and dirt. Germ theory, and its monstrous commercialisation by the post-war American “hygiene” industry, has put a booster rocket under the cleaning, sterilising and disinfecting sector. For a while Americans (turning their attention to what Addison might have called “that part of the head which we generally call the inside”) even called mental health “mental hygiene”.
Postwar concepts of hygiene distorted our notions about the relationship between cleanliness and health. I defy any medical expert to give me the scientific justification for dousing the whole body, every day, in hot water and detergent. Spaniards commonly do this twice a day. Many Japanese people have gone completely crazy, spending much of their lives immersed naked in thermal springs, showering and soaping themselves twice before, and once after, every immersion.
This column goes no further than Tom Whipple himself in quantifying the harm our cleaning mania may do to ourselves and our planet. But the truth is we do not know. The risks to the ozone layer from chlorofluorocarbons (or the link between cleaning fluids and PM2.5 particles) have been discovered late: long after refrigerators (or bleaches, or pesticides) had been certified as safe.
But this we do already know: stuff that destroys living organisms, strips oils or “dissolves” dirt should be treated with caution. What kills germs could kill humans too.