I read about this online, tried it, and now have a lot of shampoo to get rid of!!! It's, like, the one thing that's gone right this week.
You remember those papermache volcanos everyone makes in gradeschool, with the baking soda and vinegar? I bet you didn't know you were concocting a solution with which to wash hair.
The recipe, roughly, is about a tablespoon each of soda and vinegar, let the bubbles die down, add a cup of really warm water from your shower, and pour it on your head, treating it like shampoo. Obviously, you use more than a tablespoon if you have hair like mine. Rinse it out, then pour vinegar over your hair, down to the ends. That's the conditioner.
The idea is that the baking soda/vinegar mixture lifts off dirt, without messing with your scalp's natural oil. The acidity in the vinegar conditioner then seals the hair, helping to fight split ends.
My hair is both my vanity and my enemy. I only wash it once a week, because it takes half a week for it to not be a gigantic mess. About the time it looks and feels like hair, it's time to wash again. Doesn't matter what shampoo I use, anytime I'm getting ready for a special event or something where I want my hair to look NICE, I plan on washing it about three days beforehand. I joked quite regularly about shaving it - one day, the ONLY reason I didn't is that when I had chicken pox, my mom warned me repeatedly that if I scratched, I would have pock marks, so I restricted my scratching to my scalp, because my hair is more than thick enough that no one will ever see. I can only imagine the moonscape that would be uncovered if I shaved it off. I love having my hair long, I love braiding it and stuff, but out of braids it's a mess. Ordinarily, it's either really dry, or heavy and oily. Either way, it's not good. And I have had dandruff since hitting puberty - not the little flakes that fall out, the big thick flaking discs that cling in the hair and won't move.
So last Saturday, I took the soda-vinegar plunge. Risky, I know, because Sunday morning I have to beat it into submission for church. To my astonishment, Sunday morning my hair was... hair. It was brushable, it laid down nicely, I spent the whole day just running my fingers through it, flipping it around, having the time of my life with the fact that this thick, matted mane was behaving. I have had "good hair days" since!!! No more shampoo for me!!! I don't even have the dandruff I used to, I brushed out a bunch of the tiny little flakes Sunday afternoon and now have nothing. Apparently the presence of ANY flakes means that for my scalp, I need to have more vinegar than soda in the mixture, because everyone's pH is different and if the mix is too alkaline, you can have flakes - but if it's just the tiny stuff I can brush out the next day, that's pretty much NOTHING considering what I've put up with for so many years now.
I am SOOOO loving my hair now! EVERYONE should try this, seriously. Do it!!
2 comments:
I was amazed at what not washing my hair did for me. I have oily hair, and my hair would get nasty thick with oil by the night of the day I washed it. My friend convinced me that it was just washing it too much that was the problem. I went a couple of weeks without washing it, and that seemed to reset me. Now if I wash it once or twice a week, it behaves pretty well. And if I have to work a lot (and be clean otherwise), it takes a while to get it back into routine. I use Dr. Bronners, which seems to work well for me. Who knew--less is more?
carey
And, coincidentally, our friend Abby just posted this, which mentions washing her hair with mud, well, a kind of clay, but it's fun to think of getting clean with mud.
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