Are You Making These Personal Hygiene Mistakes?

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In our efforts to stay clean and groomed, many of us make mistakes without realising. Such mistakes can sometimes cause damage to our health. Here are just a few personal hygiene mistakes that you could be making.

Washing your hair daily

If scrubbing your hair with shampoo is part of your daily routine, you could be doing more harm to your hair than good. Washing your hair daily strips it of its natural oils and leads it to become dryer and more brittle over time. Resist the urge to clean your hair every day and you could keep a fuller head of hair longer.

Cleaning your ears with cotton swabs

You should never insert anything into your ear canal. Whilst cotton swabs can be used to get earwax around the ear hole, putting swabs into your actual ears can push earwax further into your ear canal. This can lead to hearing loss or even damage to your ear drum. There are much safer ear cleaning strategies that you can try if you have excessive earwax such as using baby oil to loosen it up. Don’t clean your ears too regularly – having some wax in your ears is natural and healthy.

Clipping your toenails into a curved shape

When clipping toenails, a lot of people try to create a curved shape. This is one of the leading causes of ingrown toenails – instead of growing upwards, nails can start growing into the sides of your toes. Always cut straight across in order to prevent this. A pair of specialist toenails clippers will be straight – avoid using fingernail clippers that are usually curved in shape.

Brushing your teeth too hard

There are lots of mistakes people make when it comes to brushing teeth. One surprising mistake is brushing too hard. Some people can end up brushing their enamel off which can expose yellow dentin beneath the enamel and make teeth sensitive. It’s for this reason that some people with strict dental regimes can still end up with yellow teeth. Make sure that you’re only applying light pressure when brushing teeth – try to brushing in small circles over each tooth rather than using a back-and-forth scrubbing motion.

Not changing your toothbrush regularly enough

A lot of people also fail to change their toothbrush regularly enough. Ideally, we should all replace our toothbrush every three to four months. After this periods, bristles are likely to get damaged and be less effective at brushing teeth. You should also replace your toothbrush after being sick as some of the illness causing germs are likely to stay on your brush no matter how rigorously you clean your brush.

Not cleaning your mobile phone

Many items that we touch daily can never get cleaned. Mobile phones are a big culprit for this – some of us use phones whilst we’re eating and whilst we’re on the toilet and yet never clean our devices. It’s thought that the average phone in ten times dirtier than a toilet seat. You can find smartphone cleaning kits online.