Heads up: Your shower may be spewing more than water.

RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—You don't want your bathing experience to be dirty. But between harmful chemicals in many shampoos and soaps and the way they can react with the chlorine in our tap water to create more chemical chaos, business as usual in the bathroom needs to change. One easy way you can do that is by installing a shower water filter. True, water filtration may not have as much cache as carrying a reusable bottle or the searching out an organic cosmetics line. But it's just as important because we suds up every day (most of us, anyway). Fortunately, there are retailers out there who want to help you clean up your act.

THE DETAILS: In 2010, the President's Cancer Panel, along with eating organic and avoiding plastic, recommended installing both drinking water and shower water filters as one of the most important things you can do to protect yourself from developing cancer. That's because previous studies have found some pretty alarming statistics regarding unfiltered shower water, including the fact that people absorb 100 times more chlorine in a 10-minute shower than they do from drinking a gallon of the same water.

"Most people know they should be filtering drinking water, but they don't always realize if they don't want to drink unfiltered water, they might not want to shower in it, either," says Todd Bartee, CEO of Aquasana, a leader in the home water-filtration industry.