Shower-shy Britons prove a washout

Britons do not scrub up well with two in five men and a third of women failing to have a daily shower, research revealed today.

Just over one in ten (11.5%) people in the UK only have a proper wash once or twice a week, a poll for tissue product manufacturer SCA found.

This puts us behind France, Mexico and Australia in the cleanliness stakes.

Researchers found that 41.1% of British men and 33.1% of women do not have a shower every day.

However, it does not seem to put off the opposite sex - 32.7% of women and 22.2% of men said they would date someone who did not wash every day.

And 40.4% of those polled said they would employ a shower-shy worker.

The smelliest people in the UK come from Yorkshire where 16% of people shower once or twice a week, and only half (54%) do so daily.

London is the cleanest, where three-quarters (75.9%) of the inhabitants shower or bath at least once per day and 16.3% do twice.

*The results incorporate research from a poll of 4,842 people in Mexico, Australia, the US, France, the UK, Russia, Sweden, Germany and China in 2008, and two further surveys of a total of 1,153 people in the UK.