Best Water Treatment for Skin and Hair: Shower Filter vs Water Softener vs Whole House Filter

If your skin feels tight after a shower, your hair never quite behaves itself, or you live in an area where the bathroom seems to develop a fresh layer of limescale every five minutes, it is reasonable to wonder whether your water has something to do with it.

Search online and you will find shower filters promising better skin and hair, water softeners designed for hard water, and whole house filters that treat every tap in the home.

A shower filter, whole house water filter and water softener all change your water in different ways. Choosing the right one depends on what you are actually trying to remove.

In our latest YouTube video we compare all three:

Why Does Shower Water Matter?

There are two things we are mainly interested in when talking about bathing water in a typical UK home:

Chlorine and water hardness.

They are completely different.

Chlorine is used by UK water companies to disinfect drinking water and help keep it hygienic while it travels through the distribution network. This is intentional and the low levels used in UK drinking water are considered safe.

Hardness, on the other hand, comes predominantly from naturally occurring calcium and magnesium dissolved in the water.

If you live in Leicester, London or large parts of southern and eastern England, you will probably already know what hard water looks like.

White marks and scale around your taps and shower and a kettle that looks ten years old after six months.

But what about your skin and hair?

Can Hard Water Affect Your Skin?

There has been quite a lot of research into the relationship between hard water and skin.

A systematic review and meta-analysis looked at 16 studies, including observational data covering 385,901 people.

The researchers found that children exposed to harder water had 28% higher odds of atopic eczema compared with children exposed to softer water.

There were also studies suggesting that washing in hard water can increase the amount of detergent left on the skin.

That sounds significant, but there is an important distinction.

Hard water has not been proven to cause eczema.

The research demonstrates an association.

It does not mean:

Hard water = eczema.

Does a Water Softener Help Eczema?

Researchers have tested this:

The UK Softened Water Eczema Trial involved 336 children with moderate or severe atopic eczema living in hard-water areas.

Some homes had an ion-exchange water softener installed while the others continued using their normal water.

The researchers found no significant improvement in objectively measured eczema severity from installing the water softener.

Current NICE guidance states that there is no evidence of a softener being used as a treatment, but if you know that hard or heavily chlorinated water makes your skin feel uncomfortable, changing the characteristics of the water may make showering feel more pleasant.

Option 1: A Shower Filter

A shower filter is the simplest and least expensive place to start.

Our chlorine shower filter fits directly into the existing shower connection.

You do not need a new shower.

You do not need a plumber in most cases.

And you do not need to start cutting into the incoming mains.

The cartridge combines KDF 55 filtration media with granular activated carbon.

KDF 55 is particularly useful in shower filtration because it is designed for chlorine reduction and can operate at the higher temperatures found in shower water.

What is a shower filter good for?

A shower filter makes sense if:

• you mainly want to reduce chlorine at one shower
• you dislike the smell of chlorinated water
• you want a simple, relatively inexpensive filtration option
• you do not need to treat every tap in the house

Replacement frequency will depend on use. As a rough guide, the cartridge should be replaced around every six months for a household of two to three people, or around three to four months for four people.

There is one very important limitation though.

A shower filter does not soften water.

If your shower is covered in limescale, the calcium and magnesium responsible for it are still present.

Putting a conventional shower filter on hard water does not magically turn it into soft water.

For that, you need something completely different.

Option 2: A Water Softener

If hard water and limescale are your main problems, a water softener is the system to look at.

A proper ion-exchange water softener removes the calcium and magnesium responsible for hardness.

That changes the water throughout the property.

The difference is fairly obvious when bathing.

Soap and shampoo lather much more easily in soft water, which means you generally need much less product.

You also stop producing new hard-water scale around:

• shower screens
• taps
• baths
• shower heads
• tiles
• boilers
• heating elements

For someone living in a very hard-water area, that is a very different proposition from simply filtering one shower.

Our EMS10 Eco Premier water softener is one example of a proper ion-exchange system designed to soften the water throughout the home.

Choose a water softener if:

Your main problem is limescale.

Your soaps and shampoos struggle to lather.

You want softened water at multiple bathrooms.

You want to protect taps, showers and appliances from scale as well as changing your bathing water.

Option 3: A Whole House Water Filter

What if you like the idea of a shower filter but want to filter the whole property?

That is where a whole house water filter such as the BT65 comes in.

Rather than attaching a small filter to each shower, the BT65 goes onto the incoming water supply and water is filtered before it gets distributed around the property.

That means filtered water can reach:

showers, baths, bathroom taps and kitchen taps throughout the home.

For somebody primarily interested in chlorine and whole-house filtration, that is much more convenient than installing individual filters in every bathroom.

Our BT65 provides 650,000 litres or three years of filtered water.

There is, however, the same important distinction:

The BT65 is not a water softener.

It does not remove the calcium and magnesium responsible for hard water.

If you have hard water, you can still get limescale after installing one.

What About Hair?

Hard water is unlikely to damage your hair but what many people notice is a difference in the feel of the water.

Soft water allows soap, shampoo and conditioner to lather more readily, while mineral deposits and product residue can affect how hair feels after washing.

If your main objective is changing the hardness of your bathing water, a normal chlorine shower filter is therefore not solving the same problem as a water softener.

So Which Is Best for Skin and Hair?

The easiest way to decide is to stop thinking about the products and start with the problem.

Your main concern	System to consider
Chlorine at one shower	Shower filter
Chlorine throughout the house	Whole house filter
Hard water and limescale	Water softener
Hard water + whole house filtration	Water softener + whole house filter

So that final combination is the most comprehensive.

The Ultimate Setup: Whole House Filter + Water Softener

If you want to tackle both sides of the equation, you can install a whole house filter alongside a water softener.

The whole house filter deals with the filtration side.

The water softener deals with the hardness side.

That gives you filtered, softened water throughout the home.

Do You Need to Buy Anything?

If you are considering water treatment purely because of a skin condition, particularly eczema, we would not jump straight to buying equipment.

The evidence around hard water and eczema is interesting, but an association with eczema prevalence does not mean a softener will treat established eczema.

If you're simply curious about whether you prefer soft water, try showering somewhere with a genuinely soft-water supply or at the home of somebody who owns a water softener to see if you notice an improvement.

If your issue is chlorine rather than hardness, a relatively inexpensive shower filter is an equally sensible way of experimenting before considering whole-house filtration.

If you're still unsure what type of system you need, you can also find the right water system for your home or call the East Midlands Water team on 0116 276 3334

Sources

The eczema discussion in this article is based on published research including the systematic review and meta-analysis of water hardness and atopic eczema, the UK Softened Water Eczema Trial, and current NICE guidance. The research shows an association between hard water exposure and childhood eczema, but does not confirm domestic water softening as a medical treatment for removing established eczema.