Sonic showers would clean dirt from you, but you'd still stink.
Was just thinking about this while taking a boring regular shower with water. A sonic shower just vibrates at high intensity to pulverize dirt and knock it from your body; but what about oils and lipids and all that other stuff that makes you stinky?
On a side note, I realized that the only time any dental care is brought up, it's with the ferengi. The race with quite possibly the worst teeth in the galaxy are the only ones seen using cleaning utensils on them.
In-universe explanation: they’re advanced enough to be able to kill, dissolve, and sonically motivate bacteria and dirt - even in pores. This would leave you incredibly clean. Remember: they’ve got transporters. They reconstruct you from an energy beam in a split second, not noticeably disrupting your perception of consciousness. Sonic-shower precision like that would be considered child’s play.
Woah, I never really thought about it, but the not disrupting your perception of consciousness thing is huge. Not only do they have to replicate all of the electrons and neurochemicals in the right locations, but they also have to ensure that their motion continues in exactly the same way.
If they’re able to do all of that, why the fuck does anyone ever leave a transporter dirty? They clearly already do some level of this with the bio-filters. Same with teeth, why don’t the transporters keep your teeth sparkly and your breath fresh?
Bonus points:
Are water-based showers a luxury? Surely you could just slap a replicator in there and not have to worry about plumbing.
Speaking of plumbing, I can’t recall seeing a toilet in Star Trek. Even if there are, they’d just have a matter decompiler in there, right?
So, why not just use the transporters to clear your bowels then? Can’t shit your pants on an away mission if you got cleared out on the beam down.
Like, why can’t you just roll out of bed, hop on the transporter pad, and show up to your classes at Starfleet Academy having had a Shower, a Shit and a Shave on the way!
I feel like that's the equivalent of a person from 100 years ago hearing about the internet, and saying "so if I wanted to get somebody a message in a hurry, I could pen a letter, have someone take a picture of it, take the picture to a developer, and then send that over the internet to somebody?"
I mean, you could, and it would be better than what you have to do now, but the actual way they'd do it in the future is probably a lot better.
With some of the transporter specific jargon heard throughout the shows, I suspect it's possible, but would take some modifications to the targeting scanners to separate the crud from the person. Like how they separated Tuvok and Neelix from each other in Tuvix.
Not to mention that they can vaccinate against practically every pathogen, so they could eliminate the types of bacteria that cause the majority of body odor.
I could've sworn I read something a few years ago about some scientists genetically modifying or identifying this mutant variant of bacteria that was able to outcompete the natural stuff, but don't produce the stuff that harms teeth. Was sometime in the 80s but the FDA completedly blackballed it.