No Poo Hair Washing - Day 1

Earlier today I was mindlessly pinning (as I usually do on my day off) when I came across a pin that linked to an article about washing your hair without shampoo. I was immediately intrigued. You can read the article here, but in a nutshell it talks about how shampoo causes a vicious cycle of needing to wash your hair every day. When you use shampoo, it acts as a detergent and strips your hair and scalp of their natural oils, causing your scalp to overproduce oil out of sheer panic, and in turn causing you to wake up with greasy hair and have to wash all over again.

So how do we break this cycle? The article describes how to make a baking soda solution and a vinegar spray to wash and condition your hair. (There are two ways of doing it, but I'll just be talking about the way I chose.) It sounds weird, but the article also says that your hair will be healthier, shinier, fuller, and you won't have to wash it as often. However, it also warns that your hair will go through a transition period where it basically freaks out and wonders what the hell you're doing to it, so they recommend you be able to just wear it in a ponytail or under a hat for a while. And there is a whole list of recommendations on how to help your hair through the transition.

Since I have a 3-day weekend, I figured what the hell, let's try it, and off I skipped to the dollar store.

Pieces of Crap

Step 1: Prepare your solutions.

At the dollar store I bought a ketchup/mustard bottle for the baking soda solution and a spray bottle for the vinegar spray. This was my first mistake. Those things are pieces of crap. Go to Target or Wal-Mart instead, people. I screwed the lid onto the ketchup bottle and when I went to shake it to mix the solution, it was leaking out of the lid. Annoying. Then the spray bottle would only spray at random times and I never knew if it would be a stream of liquid or a wide spray. Also annoying.

However, the two things mixed well. I used 1 tbs of baking soda for every 1 cup of water. For the spray, I used 2 tbs of vinegar for every 1 cup of water.

Step 2: Apply to your hair and rinse thoroughly.

Ok, so I knew that the baking soda solution wasn't going to lather at all, so I was prepared for that. But the lack of lather makes it difficult to know if you're using the right amount. It's hard to tell if you've covered your whole scalp or not. But I did my best and we'll see what happens.

Step 3: Air dry.

As I type, it's still drying. I'm waiting to see if my hair is going to feel funny or not, but so far I must say that the top of my head (which is already dry) already seems more voluminous than the other times I've air dried it. I'll be interested to see if it's back to being greasy in the morning.

I'll let you know how it's looking tomorrow!