Hairy Thoughts
Washing my hair without shampoo?
Yes, I stumbled over a site today that was all about giving up shampoos and instead wash your hair with either just conditioner, or with homemade stuff made out of things like eggs, apple cider vinegar, honey, bicarbonate of soda, etc. Most of these alternative methods are for people with naturally curly hair, but apparently they can work well for straight-haired people like me, too (I have almost straight hair; not enough to be wavy, but not completely straight, either). Especially if your hair is easily damaged and you have an itchy scalp.
In my alternative hippy youth, I tried washing my hair with only warm water like some other people I knew, but my hair is too thin and lank for that, with a greasy tendency; it looked awful and never started looking good, like everybody said it would do after a while. It just looked increasingly greasy and lank. This method is different -- you still wash your hair, but not with those strong tensides, and you don't add a lot of artificial stuff to it afterwards to make it soft again. The point is to make the hair look clean and healthy with a natural balance.
I guess washing your hair with conditioner would be similar to washing your face with a face lotion or mild vegetable oil -- it dissolves the dirt, or make-up, but doesn't dry out the skin. (Since I hardly ever wear make-up, I generally just wash my face with water. It works for the face.)
At the moment, I'm washing my hair every third day, with an anti-dandruff shampoo from the chemists, to try and alleviate my scalp problems. It really dries out my hair, though. I used to use a Rhassoul clay shampoo with only natural ingredients from Urtekram, but they changed owners and the formula, and the shampoo was suddenly worse than useless. Luckily, the anti-dandruff shampoo doesn't appear to contain silicone or mineral oils, which are two of the villains, apparently, so I could use that for a final shampoo wash to get all those things out of my hair. The conditioner I use does, however, so I'd have to find something else.
I think I'm going to try this!
On this Swedish site there is a lot of information about this.
Yes, I stumbled over a site today that was all about giving up shampoos and instead wash your hair with either just conditioner, or with homemade stuff made out of things like eggs, apple cider vinegar, honey, bicarbonate of soda, etc. Most of these alternative methods are for people with naturally curly hair, but apparently they can work well for straight-haired people like me, too (I have almost straight hair; not enough to be wavy, but not completely straight, either). Especially if your hair is easily damaged and you have an itchy scalp.
In my alternative hippy youth, I tried washing my hair with only warm water like some other people I knew, but my hair is too thin and lank for that, with a greasy tendency; it looked awful and never started looking good, like everybody said it would do after a while. It just looked increasingly greasy and lank. This method is different -- you still wash your hair, but not with those strong tensides, and you don't add a lot of artificial stuff to it afterwards to make it soft again. The point is to make the hair look clean and healthy with a natural balance.
I guess washing your hair with conditioner would be similar to washing your face with a face lotion or mild vegetable oil -- it dissolves the dirt, or make-up, but doesn't dry out the skin. (Since I hardly ever wear make-up, I generally just wash my face with water. It works for the face.)
At the moment, I'm washing my hair every third day, with an anti-dandruff shampoo from the chemists, to try and alleviate my scalp problems. It really dries out my hair, though. I used to use a Rhassoul clay shampoo with only natural ingredients from Urtekram, but they changed owners and the formula, and the shampoo was suddenly worse than useless. Luckily, the anti-dandruff shampoo doesn't appear to contain silicone or mineral oils, which are two of the villains, apparently, so I could use that for a final shampoo wash to get all those things out of my hair. The conditioner I use does, however, so I'd have to find something else.
I think I'm going to try this!
On this Swedish site there is a lot of information about this.