As you could guess, we highly recommend it.
Sure, you’ve probably gone most of your life without filtering your shower water, and perhaps you’ve turned out just fine. But there’s a lot more than meets the eye here. While not explicitly harmful, per se, contaminants in our shower water, such as chlorine and heavy metals, can take a toll on our skin and hair health, causing irritation and inflammation. Before we get into the nitty gritty, let’s first go back to the beginning. We’re taking you on a journey: the origin story of your shower water.
Where Does Our Shower Water Come From?
The water that pours from your showerhead likely started its journey in a lake, river, or underground aquifer near your community. In the U.S., local water sources are collected and routed to a municipal water treatment plant before entering your home.
Here’s a very simplified breakdown of the process:
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Collection: Water is drawn from natural bodies like lakes, rivers, and groundwater reserves.
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Purification: At the treatment plant, water goes through processes that remove large particles and contaminants—including coagulation, flocculation, and sedimentation steps that settle out dirt and debris.
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Filtration: Water passes through filters (like sand, gravel, charcoal) that catch smaller particles, bacteria, and parasites.
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Disinfection: This final step is where chlorine or a chlorine-based compound is added to kill harmful microbes before the water travels through miles of pipes to your home.
Once treated, the water is pressurized through infrastructure—often a mix of public mains and residential plumbing—before finally arriving at your showerhead. This process of adding chemicals to our water originally started out as a good thing—it makes water safe to drink by eliminating illnesses like dysentery and typhoid. That said, it’s not ideal for the health of our skin and hair.
It’s also worth noting that this process looks a little different depending on where you’re located. For example, lead pipes are much more common in the Midwest and Northeast, which can cause higher levels of lead in the water as the pipes erode.
Chlorine: The Big Culprit
Most municipal systems add chlorine (or sometimes chloramine, a chlorine-ammonia compound) because it’s a powerful disinfectant that continues killing microbes as water travels through pipes. Chlorine is a strong oxidizing agent, meaning it reacts readily with organic matter. That reactivity is what makes it effective at killing bacteria—it disrupts cellular processes and breaks down microbial structures. Like we said, this is important for preventing waterborne diseases, but it’s not necessarily a good thing for our hair and skin health.
To get a little more specific, chlorine is highly oxidative, which means it reacts with oils and organic matter. On your skin, it can strip the natural lipids that help your barrier retain moisture, causing irritation in the form of redness, dryness, and itchiness. For people with sensitive skin, prolonged exposure to chlorine can exacerbate issues like dermatitis, eczema, and psoriasis. Similarly, chlorine and its drying effects can create itchiness and irritation of the scalp. It also lifts the cuticles and strips hair of its natural oils, leaving it brittle, easily tangled, and frizzy.
Heavy Metals: The Sneaky Villain
The idea of heavy metal in your water sounds rather dramatic, but in reality, these are simply naturally occurring elements that exist in the Earth’s crust—think: lead, copper, iron, and nickel. The issue isn’t their existence, it’s how they enter our water systems.
Heavy metals typically enter tap water through pipe corrosion as water travels from treatment plants to homes, outdated infrastructure and older (pre-1980’s) household plumbing, and environmental runoff from soil and industrial areas.
Municipal systems are required to monitor and regulate these levels under EPA guidelines, but like chlorine, this is about water safety and not about cosmetic impact. Unlike chlorine, though, heavy metals can’t break down or evaporate—they stay in our water until they’re treated or filtered out.
And What Exactly is Hard Water?
Hard water is all about mineral content; it’s when water contains high levels of dissolved calcium and magnesium ions. These minerals are picked up naturally as water moves through limestone, chalk, or gypsum deposits underground. The longer water sits in mineral-rich rock formations, the more minerals it absorbs. In the U.S., a large percentage of homes—particularly in the Midwest, Southwest, and parts of California and Texas—have moderately to very hard water.
Whereas chlorine and heavy metals are contamination issues, hard water is a chemistry issue. When hard water is heated in our showers, or mixed with soap or shampoo, the calcium and magnesium can react and form insoluble salts (a.k.a. soap scum) which can cling to surfaces, including our hair and skin, and the glass and tile on our showers. Tangibly, this looks like scale buildup on your shower fixtures, white residue on the door, and poor lathering from our shampoos.
So, back to the original question: do I have to care?
While chlorine, heavy metals, and minerals aren’t going to cause you to wither away, it is impacting your hair and skin health on a daily basis. Over time, the drying, irritating effects of these contaminants become cumulative, leading to dry, itchy skin, weakened hair, loss of vibrance and color in dyed hair, and exacerbated symptoms of inflammatory skin conditions.
While a shower filter won’t replace a hair and skin care routine, it does help to make the most out of the products you’re already using. Without a filter, you’re constantly exposing your hair and skin to environmental stressors that undermine all of the effort—and money you’re spending—to take care of your body. So yeah, we like to think it’s worth caring about.
