What a hot shower actually does, and where the moisturizer goes

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Researched. We have not used this one long enough to give you a verdict, and we would rather say so than invent one. What follows is how it works, who it suits, and what it will not do. When we have used it properly, this page carries the verdict and the date.

NIVEA Nourishing In-Shower Body Lotion

Heat does not open your pores. Pores are not doors and have no mechanism for opening.

What heat and water do is soften keratin, which makes whatever is sitting in a follicle easier to shift. That is a real effect and a useful one. It is not the same claim, and the difference matters, because the version people believe leads them to stand under water hotter than is good for them for longer than is good for them.

What the hot water is really doing

Two things, and only one of them is welcome.

It softens the outer layer, which is why skin feels pliable and faintly swollen after a long shower, and why shaving goes better at the end than at the start.

It also strips lipids. The oily material between the cells of the outer layer is what keeps water in, and hot water with a surfactant takes more of it away than warm water with the same surfactant. That is the whole of the tight, itchy, faintly stinging feeling twenty minutes later. It is not skin being clean. It is skin that has lost the layer that was holding its water in, and the itch is the tell.

The temperature, without a number

Nobody measures their shower, so a figure in degrees is useless advice.

The usable test is colour. You should not be pink when you get out. Pink means the water was hot enough to dilate the vessels near the surface, and if it was hot enough for that, it was hot enough to take more lipid with it than you meant to lose.

The second variable matters more than the first and gets a fraction of the attention: duration. Ten minutes at a temperature you would call warm strips more than three minutes at a temperature you would call hot. The long shower is the luxury, and the long shower is also the cost.

The order of operations

Dull, free, and most of the benefit.

1. Wash the parts that need washing. Underarms, groin, feet, anywhere that smells. The rest of you mostly needs water. A full-body lather every day with a foaming wash is more surfactant than most skin has asked for. 2. Rinse the conditioner off your back last. Conditioner runs downwards. If it comes off your hair and you step straight out, it has been sitting across your shoulders and upper back for the length of the shower. It is a plausible and frequently suggested cause of congestion in exactly that distribution, and it costs nothing to rule out. If that is the pattern you have, what a BHA actually does is the more useful page, and it applies below the neck the same way it does above it. 3. Shave near the end, once the hair has softened. Not first. 4. Pat dry. Rubbing with a towel achieves nothing the washing did not, except to the skin. 5. Moisturize before you get dressed, not later. This is the whole of the three-minute rule, and it is the step that decides the outcome.

The in-shower lotion question

An in-shower lotion is formulated to go onto wet skin and be rinsed, which a body lotion is not. That is a different formula, not a different bottle.

An in-shower lotion is built to go on wet skin and then be briefly rinsed. The watery part goes down the drain; an occlusive film is meant to stay behind. That is the trick, and it is why rinsing thoroughly, which is what everybody instinctively does, is the reliable way to get nothing out of it. A quick pass, not a thorough rinse.

Where it wins. With people who will not do the after-shower step. That is not a small group and there is no virtue in pretending otherwise. An in-shower lotion used daily beats a body cream used twice a month, and it is not close.

Where it does not. Like for like, on the same skin, a proper cream on damp skin does more, because you are not rinsing part of it away by design. If you already moisturize after a shower, an in-shower lotion is a lateral move sold as an upgrade.

What it will not do

• It will not survive a long rinse. That is the single instruction on the bottle and the one people skip.
• It will not stand in for a heavy cream on genuinely cracked skin. Something you rinse cannot be the answer for skin that needs occlusion held in place for hours.
• A body wash sold as detoxifying is a scented body wash. Nothing applied for ninety seconds and rinsed off is reaching anything under the skin, and the claim is doing no work except on you.

The bath oil footnote nobody prints

Bath oils and in-shower products make surfaces slippery, and they go on doing it after you have got out.

That is a real hazard in any household with someone unsteady on their feet, and it is worth a non-slip mat and a rinse of the tub afterwards. It is the least glamorous sentence on this page and comfortably the most useful one.

The thing that decides whether this works

The last ninety seconds.

Everything above is small. The one that is not small is the temperature: turn it down far enough that you are not pink when you get out. What goes on afterwards, and how soon, is the other half of this and has its own page. Do those two and the product choice matters a great deal less than the category would like you to believe.

The product

It is the product that made the category mainstream, and the instruction on the back — rinse for a second, not thirty — is the mechanism printed in plain sight. It is cheap, it is sold everywhere, and following that one line is the whole of whether it works.

The one people are searching for is the NIVEA Nourishing In-Shower Body Lotion.

NIVEA Nourishing In-Shower Body Lotion

We do not print prices here, because a price we typed last month is a price that is wrong today.

Written by JamieG in Garner Town, Tennessee.