I am a bit susceptible to the trends that sweep the blogosphere (the corner that I inhabit, at least- the mommy/homeschooling/crafty segment). Though the temptation rarely leads to action, I entertain fantasies of making no-knead bread or handcrafting the baby’s shoes or building a cunning play kitchen. Then reality sets in and I buy a package of semi-healthy bread from Costco, a tiny pair of Crocs, and a plastic play kitchen that is ugly and flimsy but has burners that making realistic boiling sounds.
The five-gallon bucket of homemade laundry detergent sitting in the kitchen is a testament to the fact that I fall prey to these notions at times. (Thanks, Duggar family!) Additional proof- my hair.
The whole “no poo” thing was rattling around in my head for a while, but it seemed a bit too much like crazy hippie talk to me. Baking soda? Apple cidar vinegar? In lieu of shampoo? For reals? Then “no poo” started making the rounds on the Interwebs a few weeks ago and I read this article, and the whole idea sounded much more palatable to me.
Maybe it’s that I’m trying to grow my hair out. It’s a never ending cycle- I grow it out for a couple years, then chop it off when I can no longer stand the brittle/split end/breaking issue that plagues me when it’s long. My hair is thick, so drying it takes forever. If I don’t heat style it, it does this highly unattractive thing where parts are wavy and parts are straight. So the promise of healthy hair that actually behaves was mighty tempting.
And then there is our recent household mission to kick weird chemicals to the curb. We make regular use of the Cosmetic Safety Database now. Ditching sodium laurel sulfate seems like the next logical step, right?
So I was shampoo-free for the past couple weeks, and it was working out pretty well. I never experienced greasy hair or anything of the sort. I started out using a trial pack of DevaCurl products, and they were perfectly servicable until I started getting some weird buildup on my scalp. Then I started alternating those with baking soda and apple cidar vinegar, with greater success, but the results were still not quite what I had envisioned.
Although that might be due the fact that I haven’t found a styling product sans silicone that can tame my hair. So I tried to follow the Curly Girl method of styling, coaxing my waves into…something. (They sure weren’t pretty little ringlets. ) Gave up on that after a couple days of diffusing and scrunching and plopping, all leading to copious usage of barettes to disguise the insane aftermath.
I decided to try another approach and do the conditioner wash method, using a bottle of Suave Naturals Coconut conditioner that I found shoved in the back of the cupboard. For my heavier conditioner, I visited every store in a five-mile radius looking for L’oreal Vive Pro Nutri Gloss for Wavy/Curly Hair (eventually finding it at Albertsons, FYI). But you know what? The Suave shampoo bottle looks a heck of a lot like the conditioner, and I ended up shampooing my hair for three days straight.
The good news is that I can say without a doubt that the “no poo” experiment was working in my favor, because now my hair looks really, really awful after going back to regular shampoo.
