Today, I cleaned my body and hair using a rag and a wash basin.

Total water expended: 1.5L. Roughly 0.5L for body, another 1L for the hair.

This arrangement would have been unremarkable for most of human history.

Today a single hand-washing session often uses 1–3 liters of water. A typical shower expends 65–150 liters (over eight minutes). Personal cleaning now routinely consumes orders of magnitude more water than it did a century ago.

I’m not giving up on showers or ponds.

But the experiment makes it difficult to treat a personal shower as the baseline for being clean.

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