The bathroom is slowly but surely becoming a focal piece of the modern home. In the hubbub of modern life, where working takes place from the comfort of the home, it’s important to have an oasis of calm and relaxation. Indeed, TechRepublic have noted a 20% rise in water usage across America’s homes due to this new use of their facilities throughout each day. Just as the kitchen and the bedroom have become more hallowed within the busy working home, so too should the bathroom. When presented with the opportunity to upgrade and update, men should first think about what features they’d love in their ideal bathroom to make it an oasis of calm and self-love. From there, adaptations to meet the requirements of your hygiene and grooming regimen are essential; and they can even have a positive impact on your overall health.
Coloring the Environment
Redesigning a bathroom gives you the ideal opportunity to consider what it is that makes you happy when it comes to the home and bath area. Looking for inspiration online is a great first step to take – the range of gadgets and adaptations that the modern bathroom can play host to is quite astonishing, given the chastening effect on bathroom tech that the presence of water has. Given the need to wire and make safe a bathroom for this equipment, it’s a good idea to plan first.
A great place to start is lighting, and this can help you to build ambience. Bathing is, of course, a huge benefactor to good mental health. A 2018 study published in the Hindawi Journal outlined how whole-body immersion, and even showering, helped to lower stress and pain and generate significantly better mental health and emotional resilience. How can you build such an environment? Lighting is the first step. The use of LED strips is something that can be controlled via battery in your bathroom, and can give you different ambience depending on your needs. This can be put into other devices too: the best LED shower heads, for instance, can provide either warmth to the room or a feeling of ‘freshness’ by transmitting color through the water stream.
Assessing Amenities
A bathroom designed and fine-tuned towards your comfort and wellbeing is best matched with the amenities you need to get grooming done effectively in the bathroom. Grooming can (and should) take on a greater dimension than simply washing. Esquire magazine outline the benefits of in-depth grooming, and how it can boost self-esteem and impact on areas of your life that might not be directly linked to superficial grooming rituals. The perfect bathroom will help to meet these needs. That can be something as simple as the plug socket for a good quality shaver, through to building into your bathroom the equipment and storage to improve the speed and efficiency you can groom with.
Some ideas could include bespoke product shelves and containers. Having a specific area of the bathroom, a shrine, to grooming, can help you to reinforce the importance of looking after your skin and hair. Paired with good lighting, such adaptations can make your bathroom an area in which it’s easy to groom and ensure that you’re looking exactly the way you want to.
Smart Changes
Smart technology is creeping into the home, and it’s making a big impact in the bathroom too. Simple changes, like singing Bluetooth mirrors, Amazon button-style reordering devices, have started the smart revolution in the bathroom, but greater changes are afoot. The shower, for instance, can be managed through voice activation and clever machine learning to find your perfect temperature; that can then be set permanently, or changed on pre-sets for summer months. USA Today explores the option of the smart toilet and bidet, which can, among other things, help to monitor your health through blood pressure readings, UV sterilization and even, in some newer models, the ability to monitor your health through imaging, providing important records and evidence for doctor’s visits. This focus on health moves into the peripherals you choose for your bathroom. And can help to make it an oasis of calm that also protects you medically.
Helpful Peripherals
Potentially the most transformative of these devices is the smart toothbrush. Toothbrushes are, of course, a type of device that has seen consistent innovation. Whether that be from manual to mechanical, or from plastics to waste-saving variants. Studies are now highlighting the potential of smart toothbrushes in the role of preventing illness, including oral cancer.
A 2018 study published by PubMed.gov concluded that there could be meaningful benefits to be gained from the use of anomaly-detecting toothbrushes. These devices, which ‘map’ the mouth of the user and can then detect subtle changes in terrain within the mouth after each brushing. Providing an insight for dentists and those using the device that can help to nip problems in the bud. At the very least, they can detect issues like plaque build-up, bleeding from the gums, and the thinning of enamel. All useful things that could hasten a regular dentist visit. Devices like these, and those in development, can help to give real quality to the daily grooming and health processes that men undertake. While also helping to shield and improve their health and wellbeing.
Bringing together these strands will create a bathroom that ticks all the boxes. It will be relaxing, a real place of peace, calm and self-reflection. While also having everything it needs to be fully functioning. That’s the key to a good bathroom – it’s a place of function. Sure, but it’s also a real hub within the home. You can make it a pleasant experience while still having it be on hand for the completion of your daily grooming. Perhaps, with smart tech, it can even help your health in actionable ways. By providing you with the information you need to stave off health issues and remain healthy.