Jake Gyllenhaal Is the Latest Celebrity to Speak Out Against…Bathing?

Three is a trend! Jake Gyllenhaal is officially the latest celebrity to come out against…*checks notes*…washing his body.

Bathing and showering first entered the Hollywood discourse in late July, when Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher revealed they only wash their kids if they “see dirt on them.”

“When I had [newborn] children, I also didn’t wash them every day,” Kunis told Dax Shepard on his Armchair Expert, according to BuzzFeed. “I wasn’t the parent that bathed my newborns—ever.” Kutcher added, “Now, here’s the thing: If you can see the dirt on them, clean them. Otherwise, there’s no point.”

Just a week later, Shepard and his own wife, Kristen Bell, appeared on The View and shared their own feelings on the subject. “We bathed our children every single night prior to bed as their routine, then somehow they just started going to sleep on their own without their routine and we had to start saying [to each other] like, ‘Hey, when was the last time you bathed them?’” said Shepard, per BuzzFeed.

“I’m a big fan of waiting for the stink. Once you catch a whiff, that’s biology’s way of letting you know you need to clean it up. There’s a red flag,” Bell said, adding, “Honestly, it’s just bacteria; once you get bacteria, you gotta be like, ‘Get in the tub or the shower.’”

Now, when it comes to infants, this may not be a bad call. “Over-bathing an infant may dry out the skin, making it itchy and rashy,” Kelly M. Cordoro, M.D., a professor of dermatology and pediatrics, once told The New York Times. “It can be very irritating and unnecessary, as it can wash away the top layer of protective skin cells, natural oils, and normal healthy bacteria, leaving the skin dry, itchy, and vulnerable to irritation and possibly skin infections.”

Kutcher, Kunis, Shepard, and Bell’s children all range between four and eight years old, but what about grown adults? Well, according to Jake Gyllenhaal, it’s not always “necessary.” 

“More and more I find bathing to be less necessary, at times,” he told Vanity Fair in an interview about Prada’s Luna Rossa Ocean fragrance(!!!). “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.” I guess that’s what the $94 cologne he’s shelling is for? 

Obviously, people on Twitter had thoughts. The actor is currently trending with over 13 thousand tweets, most of which look something like this:

If this was meant to be a distraction from Taylor Swift’s announcement that she is releasing a 10-minute version of “All Too Well” on the Red (Taylor’s Version) album, then I guess it worked… Oh wait:

Maybe not.