A Super-Easy Quarantine Self-Improvement Tip
This sounds like an April Fool's joke, but I'm completely serious:
for those of you stuck at home for the foreseeable future anyway, now
would be a great time to kick your shampoo habit. I haven't used shampoo
since 2009 -- I still wash my hair frequently, of course, but
using only hot water and the pressure of my own fingertips to remove oil
and dirt, followed by a very light conditioner (plus wide-tooth comb)
to serve as a detangler. Compared to my shampoo days, my hair is far
nicer and healthier than ever before -- less frizzy, far fewer split
ends (I literally cannot remember the last time I found one, despite my
hair being around 2.5 feet long), easier to care for, etc.
Shampoo is literally an "addictive" substance, in the sense that most people don't need it (modern detergent-based shampoo wasn't invented until the 20th century, yet clean, shiny hair existed well before that), but if you start using it, get used to it, and then stop, for awhile you'll go through "withdrawal" and be worse off than if you never started using in the first place.
Basically, healthy hair should have a certain amount of oil, or "sebum." Shampooing strips sebum from your hair, thus making your scalp's oil glands go into overdrive to make up the difference, and ... long story short, if you're a regular shampoo user, most of the time your hair is either much drier or (paradoxically) far more oily than if you'd never used shampoo in the first place. When I kicked the habit, I experienced about two to three weeks of consistently Bad Hair Days (fortunately during a New England winter, so I could hide the worst of it under a cloche hat), then my hair suddenly got better all at once: woke up one morning after an Atrociously Bad Hair Day, took another conditioner-only shower, braced myself for another ABHD, but this time when my hair dried it looked awesome -- better than ever.
At the time, I wrote a magazine article about my newly shampoo-free life (archived link here). A year or so later, an online friend of mine told me he'd shown his wife (also afflicted with long, fine, frizzy red hair) my article and a couple other things I'd said on the matter, and she decided to give it a try. Quoth he, "It took about 2 weeks for it to stop frizzing. It took another 2 weeks before she could, for the first time in her life, run her fingers through her hair. It's been 4 months and her hair looks the best it ever has. That is all I just wanted to thank Jennifer on behalf of my very grateful spouse."
{Preens}
Of course, none of this is to say "I never get frizzy hair anymore" -- I live in Georgia, after all -- but it's the frizz of "clean healthy hair that happens to be in a ridiculously humid environment," as opposed to the frizz of dry or damaged hair.
Seriously, people: ditch the shampoo and make do with a very light conditioner (nothing advertised as "moisturizing" or "for dry hair" -- those products are for regular shampoo users with unnaturally low sebum levels). If you give up shampoo now, your hair will indeed look icky for a couple weeks, but it will return to normal and look better than ever well before this quarantine is likely to end. (And you'll save a small fortune on shampoo costs, too.)
Shampoo is literally an "addictive" substance, in the sense that most people don't need it (modern detergent-based shampoo wasn't invented until the 20th century, yet clean, shiny hair existed well before that), but if you start using it, get used to it, and then stop, for awhile you'll go through "withdrawal" and be worse off than if you never started using in the first place.
Basically, healthy hair should have a certain amount of oil, or "sebum." Shampooing strips sebum from your hair, thus making your scalp's oil glands go into overdrive to make up the difference, and ... long story short, if you're a regular shampoo user, most of the time your hair is either much drier or (paradoxically) far more oily than if you'd never used shampoo in the first place. When I kicked the habit, I experienced about two to three weeks of consistently Bad Hair Days (fortunately during a New England winter, so I could hide the worst of it under a cloche hat), then my hair suddenly got better all at once: woke up one morning after an Atrociously Bad Hair Day, took another conditioner-only shower, braced myself for another ABHD, but this time when my hair dried it looked awesome -- better than ever.
At the time, I wrote a magazine article about my newly shampoo-free life (archived link here). A year or so later, an online friend of mine told me he'd shown his wife (also afflicted with long, fine, frizzy red hair) my article and a couple other things I'd said on the matter, and she decided to give it a try. Quoth he, "It took about 2 weeks for it to stop frizzing. It took another 2 weeks before she could, for the first time in her life, run her fingers through her hair. It's been 4 months and her hair looks the best it ever has. That is all I just wanted to thank Jennifer on behalf of my very grateful spouse."
{Preens}
Of course, none of this is to say "I never get frizzy hair anymore" -- I live in Georgia, after all -- but it's the frizz of "clean healthy hair that happens to be in a ridiculously humid environment," as opposed to the frizz of dry or damaged hair.
Seriously, people: ditch the shampoo and make do with a very light conditioner (nothing advertised as "moisturizing" or "for dry hair" -- those products are for regular shampoo users with unnaturally low sebum levels). If you give up shampoo now, your hair will indeed look icky for a couple weeks, but it will return to normal and look better than ever well before this quarantine is likely to end. (And you'll save a small fortune on shampoo costs, too.)
posted by Jennifer Abel at 2:12 PM
3 Comments:
I stopped using shaving cream many years ago, after reading a similar tip, that it's just not necessary. Just hot water
FWIW, Jeff, I've never bothered using any special applications when shaving my legs; since I'm already covered in hot soapy water anyway, that worked well enough. (Granted, a man's beard hair is generally thicker than what grows on a woman's leg, but on the other hand I have a lot more shaving acreage than you do, so I imagine it all evens out in the end.)
I've reduced the amount of soap I use in my daily shower for similar reasons and with similar results. My skin is less dry as a result.
I still use a bit of soap when washing armpits and crotch, and I wash my hands with soap regularly but the rest just gets thoroughly washed with plain water. It works fine unless I've been doing some dirty job like painting snd something other than sweat needs to be scrubbed off.
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