Oh, look! It's that time of the month when the celebrity bathing debate resurfaces.
Just when you might have thought we heard the last word on the showering saga of the stars, Jake Gyllenhaal addressed the issue once again, attempting to wash away his past remarks on his hygiene habits.
"I don't know what it was," he said during a screening of his upcoming Netflix film, The Guilty, per BuzzFeed. "I answered a question where I was being sarcastic and ironic, and it's followed me around."
"Unfortunately, I showered before I came here," he continued. "So...I'm sorry."
The answer he was referring to was the one he gave to Vanity Fair, published in August, after he was asked if there is "anything revelatory" about his shower ritual. "More and more I find bathing to be less necessary, at times," the star responded. "I do believe, because Elvis Costello is wonderful, that good manners and bad breath get you nowhere. So I do that. But I do also think that there's a whole world of not bathing that is also really helpful for skin maintenance, and we naturally clean ourselves."
It had been the latest response on a subject raised days earlier by Dax Shepard on his Armchair Expert podcast. "You should not be getting rid of all the natural oil on your skin with a bar of soap every day," he argued during an episode with Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher, who were not as baffled as some of the public was when the discussion went viral.
"I don't wash my body with soap every day," the actress told him. "But I wash pits and tits and holes and soles." As for Kutcher, "I wash my armpits and my crotch daily, and nothing else ever," he explained. "I got a bar of Lever 2000 that just delivers every time. Nothing else."
Their thoughts on the matter extended to daughter Wyatt, 6, and Dimitri, 4. "When I had children," Kunis recalled, "I also didn't wash them every day. I wasn't the parent that bathed my newborns—ever."
And it turned out, when it comes to bathing their kids, they continue to take a pretty lax approach. "Here's the thing—if you can see the dirt on 'em, clean 'em," Kutcher added. "Otherwise, there's no point."
While Shepard and his other half Kristen Bell bathed their two daughters, Lincoln, 8, and Delta, 6, nightly as babies, they've since shifted to a similar philosophy as Kunis and Kutcher. "I'm a big fan of waiting for the stink," Bell said on The View. "Once you catch a whiff, that's biology's way of letting you know you need to clean it up."