Celebrities Who Take Cold Showers (2026): Four Verified Names, and the 3,018-Person Trial Everyone Misreads

Start with the distinction, because it decides everything else on this page.

An ice bath puts your whole body under water. A cold shower does not. Nothing to fall into, nothing to gasp into, no breath-holding, no breathing protocol, and you can step sideways out of the stream in half a second. Our cold plunge page refuses to print a protocol at all, and it is right to: cold shock has killed people in water, forensic pathologists have written it up, and Wim Hof's own materials say never do the breathing in or over water. That refusal was the teaching there.

A shower is a genuinely different hazard profile. So this page can do the thing that one could not — tell you what the trial actually did, with its numbers. That is the whole reason it exists separately.

One thing follows from that. Almost every "celebrities who take cold showers" list is really a plunge list wearing a different headline — Lady Gaga, Joe Rogan, Mark Wahlberg, Klay Thompson are all documented in tubs, not showers. They belong on the other page, and we did not reuse them here.

The four we could verify

Dwayne Johnson. Posted from his own verified account on 7 August 2021, answering a running celebrity argument about how often famous people bathe: "Nope, I'm the opposite of a 'not washing themselves' celeb. Shower (cold) when I roll outta bed to get my day rollin'. Shower (warm) after my workout before work. Shower (hot) after I get home from work." Note what he was asked. It was a hygiene debate, not a recovery question, and we are not going to inflate a detail into a protocol he never claimed.

Miranda Kerr. To Refinery29, in an interview by Lexy Lebsack published 19 November 2015, describing her morning: "I do coconut oil, cold shower, and rub my body, get out and rinse my mouth, and that just wakes me up." Her stated reason is waking up. Not immunity, not recovery.

Anthony Joshua. At an Under Armour panel, reported by Terri-Ann Williams in The US Sun on 18 December 2021: "A cold shower is one of the first things I do in the morning." And the reason, in his own words: "Each day presents me with millions of obstacles and I just feel like if I can get through a 30 second cold shower, then I can deal with 10 minutes of stress."

Andrew Huberman. He is the only one here who ranks the shower against the tub in his own words. From his verified account, 1 March 2022: "A good protocol is: - 11min total per week divided into 2-4 sessions - Immersion to neck is better than cold shower is better than cold air - If doing sauna, end with cold to further boost metabolism - don't do cold immersion w/in 4hrs after hypertrophy training Be safe!" His own ordering puts the shower second — worth holding onto when a page tells you the two are the same thing.

What the trial actually found

The one study people mean when they say cold showers work is Buijze et al., PLOS ONE, September 2016. It is much better than the genre deserves, and it is routinely misread.

The design. Between January and March 2015, 3,018 Dutch adults aged 18 to 65, with no severe illness and no existing cold-shower habit, were randomised 1:1:1:1 into four arms: finish every shower with 30, 60 or 90 seconds of cold, or a control group showering normally. Thirty consecutive days, then sixty days of cold at their own discretion. 79% of the intervention groups finished the thirty days.

The number everyone quotes is real. Sickness absence from work fell 29% against control (incidence rate ratio 0.71, p = 0.003).

The number nobody quotes is the honest one. On illness days — the actual primary outcome alongside absence — "there was no significant group effect." People in the cold groups did not get sick less often. They stayed off work less. Only the 60-second arm separated from control on illness days at all. The authors' own reading is that the intervention may modulate the intensity of symptoms rather than whether you get them. Fewer sick days, not fewer illnesses. Those are different claims, and the second one is the one the internet sells.

Everything is self-reported, and nobody was blinded. Participants rated their own illness days and absence through an online survey. The authors say so plainly: none of the outcomes could be objectified, and participants could not be blinded to the intervention or to their own outcome assessment — which they flag as potentially important bias. People who volunteered through social media, knew which arm they were in, then graded their own toughing-it-out. Quality of life ticked up on the mental component at 30 days and was gone by 90; work productivity and anxiety showed nothing at either point. Twenty serious adverse events were reported, all judged unrelated. The commonest mild complaint was staying cold afterwards — 196 people in the body, 257 in the hands or feet.

If you want the mood claim on top of this, it does not hold up either, and we cover why on the plunge page: the effects that survive are small, short, and mostly self-reported, and the famous 2008 cold-showers-and-depression paper is a hypothesis article, not a trial.

What the trial did, with the numbers

This is not advice. It is a description of the arms people were randomised into, which is more useful than a listicle's "just do it."

• The temperature was not chosen — it was whatever came out of the tap. Dutch ground water ran about 10°C in the study window, with cold taps at 10–12°C (roughly 50–54°F). Nobody was icing anything.
• The shower was normal until the end. Participants showered "as warm and as long as preferred" and then finished cold. Cold at the end, not cold throughout.
• The cold segment was 30, 60 or 90 seconds. The 30-second arm reduced sickness absence just as the longer ones did. Longer did not clearly do more.
• Thirty consecutive days. That is the shape of it: 30 days, ending each shower with 30 seconds cold, at whatever your tap gives. The authors list temperature variation by location as a limitation of their own study, so yours will differ from theirs.

The plain safety line: even a shower produces a real cold shock response — a gasp, a jump in heart rate and blood pressure. Standing up it is far less dangerous than being in water, but it is not nothing. With a heart condition, high blood pressure, Raynaud's, or a pregnancy, or if you are simply unsure, ask your own doctor first.

The honest paragraph

Look at what made these four famous. Dwayne Johnson has a full-time performance staff. Anthony Joshua is a heavyweight champion with a camp around him. Miranda Kerr built a career in an industry that pays for appearance. None of that came from a cold tap, and none of it transfers.

And the mechanism is thin once you read the paper properly: one self-reported absence number, unblinded, with the illness result flat. Real, and modest. We also picked these people because they are famous, which is a broken way to pick anyone. Plenty finish every shower cold and it changes nothing they can measure; you never hear from them.

Who we cut, and why

Katharine Hepburn. Repeated everywhere as the original cold-shower celebrity. We looked for the interview and could not reach one — the claim circulates through fan-fact roundups and quote sites citing each other, never a named piece with a date. Her family's cold-bathing habit appears in biographical coverage, but that is a biographer describing a household, not her saying she took cold showers. Unverified.

Cate Blanchett — and why she is not on the list. Genuinely on record and genuinely dated — via Business Insider, 17 December 2025: "It's so popular it's almost a cliché, but I do get into cold water every morning. It's a real leveler and brings me into the day with a fabulous jolt." But "get into" is immersion, not a shower, and the reporting frames it as a plunge. Right habit family, wrong page.

Terry Crews. Cut, and worth naming why. He joined the same August 2021 bathing debate, so his name sits beside this quote constantly — but the "Shower (cold) when I roll outta bed" line is Johnson's. We checked the published coverage and it attributes it correctly; it was the AI summaries above the results that swapped the names on us. Crews is on record about how often he showers, not about cold water.

Where HealthBrew fits

HealthBrew has no cold-water feature and no opinion about your shower.

What it has is the thing the Buijze trial could not do: a record that is not your memory. Every outcome in that study was somebody grading their own month from recall — the exact weakness the authors flagged. A nightly close takes about sixty seconds: how the day went and what you did, landing green, yellow or red. Mark the days you finished cold, and after a month your own log answers for you what the trial answered for the average of 3,018 strangers. Your first 30 daily closes are on us, no credit card.

Educational content, not medical advice, and not a protocol. Quotes are attributed to the named speaker and dated. Katharine Hepburn is marked unverified. Cold water carries real risk even standing up: talk to your own doctor first, especially with any heart or blood-pressure condition. Everything on this page describes showers, not immersion — for ice baths and plunges, including the safety reasons we decline to give a protocol there, see our cold plunge page.