'Washgate': Man Sparks Heated Debate as He Asks if People Wash Their Legs in the Shower

An editor and writer, Conor Arpwel, from Washington DC, posed a question to his 6,000 plus followers which sparked a heated debate about washing one’s legs in the shower.

“Do you wash your legs when you take a shower?” Conor asked in a poll last week, which since became viral.

With only a few hours left on the survey, almost 850,000 participated and revealed that 80% of respondents washed their legs while 20% chose not to.

While the comments streamed in Conor set the records straight with an “official statement” regarding his poll post on Twitter and wrote, “My name is Conor Arpwel, and I am a leg washer. Leg washing is an important component of my cleanliness regimen, but also I’m not out to get people who don’t wash their legs for various reasons.”

While he only meant for it to be a “fun and frivolous topic,” Conor now has “trouble keeping up with everything.”

According to netizens, one of the “various reasons” people choose not to wash their legs, it's because they think it’s a waste of time:

After doing some “twitter math,” a user pointed out just how much time a quick 30-second leg wash adds up to over a long period and added, “If you wash your legs every day for 30 seconds for the next 40 years, that's 122 hours. So you would have spent just over five days of your life washing your legs in that time span.”

But for others, it's not about the time factor. They feel it unnecessary to spend additional effort on their legs as the soap and water running down the legs take care of dirt:

Many didn’t agree with that logic and insisted that one couldn’t be clean if the whole body didn’t get washed:

The leg washing debate blew up into the celebrity sphere as Taylor Swift told Ellen DeGeneres on her show Wednesday that shaving her legs counts as washing them.

On the TODAY show, Savannah Guthrie agreed with Taylor’s comment and added, "First of all, I think I'm all stocked up on embarrassing confessions this week, but when I shave my legs, like Taylor, I think that counts as washing because I put soap (on my legs),'' Savannah said. "I don't even use shaving cream."

While many feel that plain rinsing does the trick when it comes to washing their legs, the same can be said for hair.

Since there is no stock standard for how often one should wash their hair, it depends on the individual.

Factors that can weigh in on one’s shampooing habits can include hair type and texture, scalp condition, hair styling preferences, and any medical conditions that might be present.

Personal preference and expectations about how hair should look often prescribe what products get used and how often, but it also varies with culture, age, and from decade to decade much like preferences regarding leg washing.

During an interview with a woman from Brighton, England, she revealed that she had grown her 6-foot long hair since the age of 18, but more surprisingly, that woman hasn’t washed it in 13 years because she “hated it.”