10 Weeks In... I Don't Need No 'Poo!

No shampoo, that is!

My current great experiment in life is to see if going the no shampoo route would work for me. Ten weeks in and everything is going quite well. There have been exactly zero people who have run from me in horror due to weird smells emanating from my head. Nice!

The past year or two has been one discovery after another, culminating in the repeated crushing of the conventional wisdom of our day, and a lovely layer of simplicity threaded through my daily existence. Now I can eschew the chemical laden shampoo for good if I want, and it is awesome.

Not that it was easy at first, but I have been heading for this for years (ha!). I have dry, naturally curly hair, and some time during college was told by a girlfriend that washing my hair every day was 'crazy', and that I should try every other day, or even every third day. I immediately began every other day, with just running water through my hair during the shower. A nice warm water rinse, and conditioning the ends. The result was so positive that I quickly went to washing my locks only two or three times a week.

A few years later I had a stylist tell me that I washed my hair too much. It was getting all dried out and broken, so she told me to refrain from the suds to once a week at the most. When my Hispanic girlfriends whom I worked with found out, they applauded my new membership in the 'Stinky Head Club.' My hair was easier to manage, and the breakage problem corrected itself quite quickly. Even before my recent stoppage of shampooing, my stylists stopped mentioning my split ends, because I barely had them anymore! Even through sun and wind and shoulder length hair, my hair was easily healthier than it had ever been.

Now I am two and a half months without shampooing, and my hair is soft and smells nice. I rinse it in the shower a couple times a week, and still put conditioner on the ends, and no one is the wiser. Until now. It didn't take nearly as long as I thought it would for my hair and scalp to adjust, and the very few days of extreme oiliness was easily masked by headbands and ponytails. I even recently discovered that I could still lighten my hair while in this 'dirty' state. Hooray! I wonder what my stylist will say the next time I walk in her salon. I have come this far, I am pretty sure I am not going back to the routine of shampoo.