Hello and welcome to my hygiene corner
here in the ISS.
This is the place where I wash, brush
my teeth or
after workouts take a shower ISS style.
The heart of the hygiene corner is
the toiletry pouch. Comfort-1M.
It is Russian-made and most crew members ask
to have one set up for them.
It's really useful to deploy our
hygiene items.
And hygiene items come come up in a zip-lock
like this one.
This contains supplies that need to last
for six months. They don't look much
different from what your hygiene items
look in your bathroom probably.
You can see a toothbrush here.
Toothpaste too. Deodorant.
And as far as towels are concerned,
we cannot wash stuff up here so
we get a supply of towels. Every week
we get a towel like this one. And a smaller washcloth.
I usually take my new ones out on Sundays.
So it's not quite time yet.
I'll put those back. And for today
I will use the ones that I have already
deployed for the week.
Every second day we can also take out a new
let's say camping towel, it's one of
those
light towels. It comes in a foil like this, it is dry
and then we can add water, wet it and it's really nice
to clean your skin. In terms of brushing
your teeth.
It is actually very similar to what you would
do an Earth.
As I said, toothbrush and toothpaste
look just the same, and you brush your teeth
just the same.
The only difference of course is that we don't have a sink
to spit in when we're done. All that
extra
toothpaste, so some astronauts
just swallow it, it's quick and easy.
I personally don't like to do that
so I actually spit it in a towel.
It's not the most elegant thing but
you have to do what you have to do.
As far as soap is concerned it comes up in pouches
like this one. You need to
add water. And then you get
a nice liquid soap pouch which
needs to last for about two weeks.
And it's a no-rinse type of soap, it doesn't make a lot of foam
and it doesn't really need to be rinsed.
And of course
we do not have any running water up here.
So we also need to fill up water
pouches.
We can connect pouches like this
one to the water dispenser which is in
the nearby module, in the US lab.
I personally like to fill it up
with warm water when it's time to wash
but you can also fill it up with ambient
temperature water.
So I'll go ahead and do this right now,
and I'll see you in a minute.
Here I am and I got my water. So first of all I'd
like to show you
how water behaves in weightlessness.
Which is kind of interesting.
Of course it doesn't fall down,
like it does on Earth.
And it kind of tends to stick to your skin
because of surface tension.
I don't know if you can see it.
See it doesn't really want to move away
from your hand
It's just because of that surface tension
effect. Now of course
I put a lot of water on my hand just
to show you.
You wouldn't use all that water to wash.
Just because it's a little bit difficult to control.
So I'm  actually going to dry it off.
But, if you have some time
to take your time and be
careful you can, you can do that I think
I do it sometimes I really put some water
on my skin.
Like that.
Just a little bit.
And then I add some soap. Like that.
And then you can carefully go ahead and rub it.
And it actually really 
gives you a nice feeling of cleanliness.
Then as I said I like to keep my
actual towels here dry.
So I can use them to dry off.
Now of course you don't always have the time to take it slowly
and be so careful.
So if you are a little bit more in a rush.
Let's say it's a work day and you had your
work out and then you have to rush off
and do something else.
Then you will simply
just squirt the water into your camping
towel and add some soap
and that's a lot easier to control 
because you can just
rub your skin like that. I don't find it as
pleasant.
But it's certainly a lot quicker and
easier to control.
Now all the water that you use 
eventually ends up in the
towels that you use to dry. We leave
those towels close to a ventilation grid, like in this case
you can see a ventilation grid right here.
So that they can dry off and all the
water then is recuperated.
It evapourates in the air, and then in
the air conditioning system
it condensates again and it goes into our
water recuperation bus and it 
actually gets turned into
portable water again. So we don't
absolutely lose any of the water
that we use to wash.
Cutting your fingernails is not the
easiest thing in weightlessness.
Of course you
you don't want to lose any pieces of nails around the cabin.
So the best thing is actually to do
it really close
to a return grid of the ventilation
system so that all the pieces of nails that you cut off
get immediately attracted
sucked towards the grid. Kind of like
this.
There you go. And then when you are done, of
course, you want to have
a vacuum cleaner handy so that you can clean after yourself.
And to wash your hair.
We have a special no-rinse shampoo.
That requires theoretically no rinsing, but at least very little rinsing.
So we just squirt water into our hair,
we add some shampoo.
We massage it just like we would on Earth. And then we
dry the excess water and shampoo
off, with a towel.
And off we go!
