There’s a reason that there is a whole genre of wisdom called “old wives tales”. Now that’s a politically incorrect term these days but it’s used here to illustrate a point about chlorine pools. These are bits of wisdom that become part of our behavior even if there is little evidence to support it.
For example, I was always told as a child never to put my coat on the bed of any house when we were visiting. We’d go to a party and everyone else was throwing their coats on the bed but not us. We hung ours up and were adamant about it.
Years later, I asked why we always did that and my aged mother told me that her mother (my grandmother) had an experience where she believed she caught lice from putting her coat on a bed at a party. This became our standard down through generations even though I’ve never met anyone else with that same experience. It’s just the way I was raised.
So when I started to question the wisdom of swimming in highly chlorinated (bleach) pools, I got the same kind of response which was, it’s the way it’s always been done and nothing else works. Although the sensation I had of dry skin, red eyes and bleach smell every time I went in a pool was pretty horrible, everyone else seemed to accept it although nobody seemed to like it.