My hair hasn’t been washed with shampoo or conditioner, cut or coloured in over six months. And it’s actually doing amazingly well. You might be wondering why, oh God, why? In a nut shell, it’s because I wanted to use less stuff on my body and send less stuff down the drain.
Isn’t it just a little bit strange that we have to use three different types of soap when we wash? Is that so I can be sold more stuff I don’t actually need?
To be honest, I haven’t even missed it – one less thing I have to do in my day. Some people talk about transitioning and weaning off shampoo but you want to know what happened when I stopped washing my hair cold turkey? Nothing. Nothing happened.
Turns out there is nothing I do in my day that can’t be washed off with regular water. The only things I now use are a natural DIY hair mask and scalp scrub once every couple of months. Winning!
I’m not saying that everyone can go cold turkey with shampoo – I get that there are different hair types and so on. But washing strips your hair of its natural oils and actually stimulates the glands to produce MORE oil.
Shampoo also contains quite powerful detergent and emulsifying agents. The general rule is the more foamy and sudsy your shampoo lather is – the more ingredients it contains that you can’t spell or pronounce. And after that stuff goes down the drain where does it actually end up?? I don’t know. Maybe the fish have become accustomed to getting shampoo in their eyes.
So, in summary, I stopped washing my hair and nobody died. If anything I actually get less knots now. Hair is neither oily or dry. It doesn’t smell like Palmolive but it doesn’t smell like sour milk either. It just smells like hair.
This post originally appeared on Virginia’s blog, which you can find here.
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Disclaimer: If you have curls and need product to keep them from being a giant, frizzy mess you can't do this.
It's funny because, as a mixed (white, black, south east Asian, Jewish) person myself, I have extremely kinky (tight) curly hair and I only wash it once a week or once every two weeks. Not because I'm lazy, but because when your hair is curly, it actually gets DRYER the more dirty it gets. I have to put oil in my hair and constantly have to add moisture because my curly hair is always dry and brittle if I wash it too long or too often. Shampoo isn't as important to curly head folks as conditioner is. Sometimes I have to co-wash and if I wash my hair more frequently than once a week or so, it'll be truly dry, brittle, and frizzy. NOT washing curly hair often is good. This is a crazy and absurd and outlandish idea to white folks and others with hair that gets greasy when dirty, but it's just the norm for those of us with African roots. If our hair looks oily that's GOOD. It means it's healthy.
I couldn't agree more. I have wavy to loose curls and I shampoo NY scalp 1-2 times per week, anything more destroys my hair. I rinse with water if I exercise though.