Health experts say to wash your water bottle every day. I definitely do this, even if I can’t recall the last time I actually washed my water bottle. I must wash it so often, all my water-bottle-washing incidents blend together. It’s involuntary, like breathing. You wouldn’t ask anyone how many times they’ve breathed today, would you?
Just like any other dish, a water bottle needs to be washed. Even if your water bottle looks clean, it’s teeming with mouth bacteria and other particles that need to be vanquished, just like the invisible dirt, sweat, and skin flakes on bedsheets and bras—which I always wash weekly, sometimes.
But even if I didn’t wash my water bottle every day—hypothetically, of course—it only contains water, right? Water is what you use to clean dirty stuff, so in a way, a water bottle is self-cleaning. Like an oven. Or a vagina. For someone who doesn’t ever wash their water bottle (a.k.a. not me), this theory—like a self-cleaning water bottle—would definitely hold water.
Even so, it’s vital to at least scrub off that grayish gunk on the spout where you put your mouth hundreds of times a day. Otherwise, you’ll just be drinking bacteria backwash. Though one might argue—with incredibly convincing logic—that if the gunk was created from germs in your mouth, it’s not that bad, right? No one has ever died from self-infecting themselves with water bottle mouth gunk, probably. Or from that black moldy-looking stuff that grows under the nozzle, which—even though I just described it very specifically—I have never seen, because I clean my water bottle every day. When I remember. And when I’m not busy with other stuff.
I can acknowledge that, for some people, it’s inconvenient to wash your water bottle when you use it all the time. When it’s empty, you fill it with water, repeat ad infinitum. Still, you can stop drinking water for five minutes to wash the bottle. Even though right after, it’ll feel weird drinking from a vessel that, moments ago, was filled with soap bubbles, and yes, you rinsed it well, but you might still imagine you’re tasting dish soap, and who wants that?
Did you know the outside of your water bottle gets dirty too? That water bottle has been rolling around on the floor of your car, on the gym locker room bench, and on top of that pile of bras you are definitely going to wash at some point. Just pick up a sponge and scrub the outside, even though you might have cool stickers that you don’t want rubbed off. Especially if the stickers were surprisingly expensive.
But really, there’s no excuse. So many water bottles these days are dishwasher safe, so washing them is as simple as tossing them into the top rack. But not the cap. Or the rubber nozzle. Or the straw. You’ll probably have to wash those by hand, using a pipe cleaner. That seems like it could be a lot of work. Plus, pipe cleaners only come in packs of 200, and what is one supposed to do with the other 199 pipe cleaners?
Look, just wash your water bottle, okay? Otherwise, you might get nightmares of the mouth gunk coming to life and swallowing you limb by limb because you’ve let it fester on your water bottle for years without cleaning it off. But that’s just a dream and has no parallels whatsoever to my life, because I always wash my water bottle. Or at least, I have strong intentions of doing so, and it’s the intention that counts. Hear that, demon mouth gunk?
Of course, even if you do wash your water bottle every day, it will never stay clean if you have poor oral hygiene. A clean water bottle begins with a clean mouth. That’s why you should brush and floss your teeth every day. Which I definitely always do. Sometimes.