Why Your Shower Water Matters More Than You Think: The Thinking Behind The Brand Aquabliss

Aquabliss was founded in 2015 with one clear belief: the water you use every day should care for your body, not work against it. Nearly a decade on, the brand has helped millions of people rethink something most of us never question. We sat down with the founder of Aquabliss to talk about what’s really in your shower water, why the industry gets it wrong, and what’s coming next.

It Started With a Rabbit Hole

Before Aquabliss, I was working at a marketing agency. I worked with a lot of clients across a lot of categories, and what I kept seeing was the same pattern: a brand with a mediocre product, a well-funded campaign to push it, and then – inevitably – the reviews would catch up. The business would slow down or fail. The product had never really been the point.

That frustrated me. I wanted to build something where the product was the whole point. So in 2015, Aquabliss started as a shower head brand, and we were looking for complementary products. That’s when we first came across shower filters.

My first reaction was honest: why do you even need this? Our water is the safest in the world… right? That question sent me down a rabbit hole. And what I found really changed the whole direction of the company.

What You’re Actually Washing With

Most people know they shouldn’t drink swimming pool water. They know that after a swim, they should rinse the chemicals off. What very few people realise is that they’re rinsing that chlorinated pool water off with… more chlorinated water.

Municipal water is treated with chlorine because it needs to be. It’s how we keep drinking water safe at scale. But once that water leaves the treatment plant and arrives at your tap, the chlorine has done its job. There’s no reason for it to be on your skin and in your hair during a hot shower. That’s the problem Aquabliss was created to solve.

Here are three things most people don’t know about their shower water:

• Your skin absorbs chlorine during a hot shower. Your skin is the largest organ in your body. During a hot shower, your pores open and can absorb chlorine and other impurities from the water. There’s a widely cited figure that you can absorb more chlorine in a 10-minute hot shower than you would from drinking 8 glasses of tap water.

• You’re also inhaling it. Showerheads produce fine water vapour, and during a hot shower in an enclosed space, that vapour can carry chlorine. You’re not just showering in it, you’re breathing it in too.

• A shower filter starts working immediately. Some customers, particularly those who get skin irritation or rashes when showering, notice a difference from the very first shower. The filtration doesn’t need a run-in period. It reduces chlorine and organic impurities from day one.

The Last Place Anyone Looks

One of the things that has surprised me most, running a water care brand, is how late people arrive at water as a possible cause of their skin and hair concerns.

They’ll change their shampoo. Try a new moisturiser. Switch washing detergent. Go fragrance-free. Try everything. And the water – which is touching their skin and hair every single day, in volume, at heat – is the last thing they investigate.

Most people don’t realise their water might be contributing to the problem until they change it and notice what stops happening. Your skin doesn’t feel tight when you step out of the shower. Your hair doesn’t squeak. The bathroom doesn’t smell faintly chemical after a hot shower. You stop reaching for as much moisturiser. These things feel normal until they go away.

The Industry Gets This Wrong

There are a lot of voices in the shower filter market, and not all of them are helpful.

One example: brands that compete on the number of filtration ‘stages’. You’ll see products claiming 15, 20, even 30 stages. The problem is that many of those stages involve exotic minerals and beads that don’t meaningfully improve water quality. And to fit them all in, those brands often have to reduce the volume of the proven filter media – calcium sulfite, activated carbon, redox media – that actually does the work. More stages, worse filtration.

Another one is the TDS obsession. TDS stands for Total Dissolved Solids, and some brands push TDS meters as a way to measure water quality. The lower the TDS, the better the water; that’s the pitch. But it’s a misleading metric. Cheap mass-produced filtered water scores near zero on a TDS meter. High-quality natural spring water, rich in beneficial minerals, might score 350 or more. According to TDS logic, the spring water is worse for you. That’s obviously wrong, and it’s a useful reminder that a single number rarely tells the full story.

What actually matters is reducing what doesn’t belong – chlorine, organic impurities, sediment, THMs – using media that has been tested and proven to do so.

We’re Realists, Not Fear Mongers

There’s something important I want people to understand about the way Aquabliss thinks about this. We’re not here to frighten people about their water. Chlorine in municipal water is there for a reason. Without it, we wouldn’t have safe drinking water at the scale modern cities require. That’s genuinely important.

But once that water leaves the treatment plant and reaches your faucet, the chlorine has served its purpose. It’s not needed on your skin, in your hair, or in the steam you breathe during a shower. The question isn’t whether your water is dangerous, it isn’t. The question is whether it’s as kind to your body as it could be.

Most people would hesitate to drink straight tap water in certain cities and will reach for a filter pitcher or bottled water instead. But they’ll happily shower in it, wash their face with it, and bathe their children in it. That inconsistency is the thing I’d most like to change about how people think about water care. If the water going into your body matters, the water that touches your body every day matters too.

The Products: What Good Water Actually Feels Like

When people ask me which Aquabliss filter I use personally, the answer is the Daily Essential+ Shower Filter My preference is a filter that reduces as much of what doesn’t belong as possible – chlorine, THMs, pharmaceuticals, sediment, organic impurities – and then I complement it with a natural shampoo and body wash that provides the vitamins and minerals my body needs. I keep the filtration focused on what it’s good at.

When someone asks how they’ll know if a shower filter is working, I always say: don’t watch for what starts happening. Watch for what stops. Skin that doesn’t feel tight after a shower. Hair that isn’t dry or squeaky. A bathroom that doesn’t smell faintly of chemicals. A reduced need for heavy moisturiser. These things become normal quite quickly, and most people don’t realise they were ever abnormal until they’re gone.

For the sceptic who thinks this is all unnecessary, I use the swimming pool analogy. Everyone knows how skin and hair feel after a day at the pool — dry, a little itchy, stripped. That’s chlorine at work. Your shower water isn’t as concentrated as a pool, but the chemistry is similar and the exposure is daily. If you wouldn’t want to rinse off in pool water, it’s worth asking whether your shower is as different as you assume.

The Rebrand: Closing the Gap

The thing I’m most excited about with the rebrand is that the brand will finally match the company we actually are. For years, the products have been more thoughtful than the packaging suggested. The science has been more rigorous than the website conveyed.

This rebrand isn’t about reinventing Aquabliss. It’s about closing the gap between what we’ve always been doing and how it presents to someone discovering us for the first time. The values haven’t changed. Clarity, transparency, products that do what they promise. What’s changing is how clearly that comes through.

What’s Coming Next

There’s a new shower filter in development that addresses something the rest of the industry has quietly avoided for years. It uses technology that doesn’t currently exist anywhere else in the category. I’ll leave it there for now as I don’t want to spoil the surprise!

Beyond that, we’re in the early stages of something more ambitious: a shower that rethinks the whole experience. Powerful pressure and water that actually feels soft on your skin. Most showers make you choose between the two. We think you shouldn’t have to.

The best piece of advice I’ve ever been given in business is this: don’t make products, make solutions. If you start with a product, you spend your time convincing people they need it. If you start with a problem, the product almost designs itself, and the people who have that problem, find you. That thinking has guided everything we’ve done at Aquabliss since day one, and it’s what will guide whatever comes next.

Aquabliss was founded in 2015. The full range of shower filters – including the SF100 Daily Revitalize, SF220 Daily Essential, SF400 Daily Revitalize+, and SF500 Daily Essential+ Shower Filters are all available at aquabliss.com, Amazon and Walmart.