To Wash or Not To Wash

This what happens when you wear your jeans for a year daily without washing them once? NOTHING! U of A student Josh Le with the jeans he wore almost every day without washing them. He is holding bacteria samples taken at 15 months (left) and at 13 days (right).
Josh Le, 20, bought a pair of Nudie Jeans in September 2009. He wore them nearly every day and even slept in them for about a month to really let the sweat shape the creases. He spilled food on it, wiped it off with a paper towel, and kept on going. “I wanted to push it to the extreme,” he said.

But when Le and assistant human ecology professor Rachel McQueen swabbed the inside of the jeans and tested them for bacteria in December 2010, they found levels pretty normal. And after Le washed the jeans, then wore them for 13 days before re-testing them, bacteria levels were nearly identical.

The pair showed off the results on campus Wednesday.

“I was pleasantly surprised,” said McQueen. “What I found was just normal skin flora. The counts were really, really similar. The bacteria load from the swabbed areas were pretty much the same.”