No, this doesn't have anything to do with dirty diapers or poo--or stinky poo as we call it at our house. "No 'poo" refers to cleansing your hair without soap or shampoo. There are about a million different methods that fall under the the "no 'poo" definition--probably because there are so many different hair types!
Now, why in the world would I ever want to stop using shampoo and conditioner? Some people do it for environmental reasons, others because of sensitive scalps or to save money or because nothing seems to work quite right for their hair or just for fun. For me, nothing seems to work quite right for my very fine, thin, stick-straight and generally oily hair. And I think I can save us some money, though the savings aren't much when a $6 bottle of Ganier Frutis lasts for 2-3 months. My thin hair doesn't need much shampoo or conditioner to be clean.
However, I decided that since all conditioners seem to weigh down my very fine hair and shampoos tend to over-dry it, I wanted to try something more natural. Back in January or so I decided that once my bottle of shampoo/conditioner 2-in-1 ran out, I would be switching to baking soda and vinegar to clean my hair.
To be honest, I didn't do a lot of internet research on this switch. I have several online friends who use a couple different methods of no 'poo, so I mostly just talked to them about it. Becky at South of Sunnybrook was especially helpful. :) The method that enchanted me the most, if that's really the right word to use, was the one that uses baking soda and vinegar rinses. Why? I don't know, maybe because I think baking soda and vinegar are some of the most wonderful cleaning products in the world and every household should have a nice stock of them. :)
So, the fateful last squirt of my shampoo came on May 10th. I knew it was coming and had prepared myself by talking with my friends to know what to expect and to figure out what to start with. The two things I heard the most were: 1) this takes some experimenting to get it right for your hair and 2) it will take a while for your hair to adjust to not being cleaned by soap--be ready for your hair to look nasty for a few weeks. Here follows my log of this experiment.
Week 1 (May 11-17):
Day 1--I decided to start with a routine that involves me massaging about a tablespoon of dry baking soda into my dry scalp, rinsing it out, and then rinsing it with a mixture of 1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar mixed with 1 cup of water. Hair looks and feels great! Vinegar smell only sticks around for as long as my hair is wet.
Day 2-- Hair is a bit greasy but not bad.
Day 3-- Hair pretty greasy, which is totally expected. Hope it doesn't look this bad for church on Sunday... It was really hard to get the baking soda down to my scalp, it wanted to stick to my hair. Gross.
Day 4-- Re-read some info a friend sent me. She mixes her 1 tablespoon of baking soda into 1 cup of water (and then does the same vinegar rinse I'm doing). That sounds a lot easier than getting dry baking soda into my greasy hair. Tried that. Hair immediately felt much, much cleaner. I still massaged my scalp (which is good for your hair follicles) and followed the rest of my routine. When dried, my hair looks amazing--no grease, just nice shine. I think I will keep this change for now.
Day 5-- Hair looks great again after washing.
Day 6-- Decided to try cleaning my hair every other day. Today was a no-wash day and my hair looks gross and greasy.
Day 7-- Hair looks great again after cleaning.
Week 2 (May 18-24)
Day 8-- No-wash day again. Hair looks gross. I'm going to try to keep this up for a while to see if my hair adjusts, but I don't enjoy the gross hair days.
Day 12-- Another no-wash day. My hair is definitely adjusting to this new pattern. It still looks greasy at the roots and not quite as clean as on wash days, but it's not embarrassing to go out and about in it. It doesn't hold styling as well (I only dry if I have to and curl with an iron on its lowest setting--nothing more), but enough to look fine.
Week 3 (May 25-31)
Day 18-- I had an epiphany earlier this week. I realized that if I'm not washing my hair every day, that I don't have to take a shower in the morning anymore! This saves me a ton of time in the mornings with my little toddler running around, bent on creating havoc. So I've switched my showers to the evenings. This is working great, though I still need to wet my hair to actually fix it decently in the morning. Towards the end of the 2nd day, my hair still looks rather gross to me. Most people wouldn't think twice about it at this point, but I know it doesn't look as nice as it does when it's only 24 or 36 hours since being washed. BUT it does seem to be adjusting to this routine, so I'm going to keep going with it.
Week 5 (June 8-14)
I wasn't thrilled with the no-wash days. My hair looked great at 24 hours post-wash, but definitely needed to be washed between 36 and 40 hours post-wash. By 48 hours (time for another wash!), it looked awful. That just wasn't working for me, so I switched things up again. I am back to washing my hair every day (it is summer, after all!), but only with half the concentration of baking soda and vinegar. So I was doing 1 tablespoon of baking soda per 8 oz. of water; now I'm doing a half tablespoon (more like a heaping teaspoon) of baking soda per 8 oz of water. The same goes for the vinegar. Seems to be working fine so far.
Week 7 (June 21-27)
I'm liking how this current hair routine is working out. The 1/2 tablespoon of baking soda and vinegar to 8 oz of water seems just about right for summertime. My hair still looks pretty good when it's time for the next wash so I could probably decrease the concentration of the baking soda and vinegar a bit more, but I think I'll just be sticking with this for a while. I imagine that when cooler, drier weather comes, I may need to re-adjust my routine but we will see when that time comes.
A couple notes:
-One thing I've found strange about this switch is how my hair acts when it's being styled with a curling iron (which happens 2-3 times a week). It still kind of bothers me when I curl it and it holds the curl while looking kind of, well, greasy. But then I just shake my head to help separate and settle the hairs and it looks fine. I'm guessing that I'm seeing that now that my hair is not being stripped of its natural oils.
-My husband says that my hair feels the best that it's ever felt (we've been married just over 3 yrs) and I think I agree. My hair looks nice and healthy to me, which makes me feel good about it. :) We'll see what happens when our baby is born since hormonal changes can have significant impact on how hair acts.
-I'm done with this for now, though I will probably update it later this year if I have to make any significant changes to my hair washing routine after the baby comes or with the weather change. Hope that others find this useful--or just fun to read. :)
Postpartum update: I did find that I needed to increase the amount of baking soda I used from 1/2 a tablespoon to a full tablespoon for 8 oz. of water. Apparently my non-pregnant hormones make me more greasy. That was the only change.
-It's now been almost 2 years since I switched to cleaning my hair with baking soda and vinegar and I see no reason to ever go back to shampoo. I'm very happy with this method and my hair looks better and acts healthier than it ever did before.
~Regina
Showing posts with label natural. Show all posts
Showing posts with label natural. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Friday, April 22, 2011
Where I've Been and Earth Day...
I've been meaning to update for a couple weeks but have been putting it off. However, one of my blogger friends, Becky, suggested I write an Earth Day post inspired by The Sage Butterfly. So, first my update then my Earth Day thoughts. :)
Update (AKA Where in the world did I go???):
So, shortly before dropping off the face of the earth, I decided I was going to try to post once a week (since twice a week was too much for me). What I had not anticipated was being wiped out by morning sickness shortly after making that commitment--mind you, the pregnancy is totally planned, but the wiped out part wasn't. Is it ever? For the past 3 months or more, I've been just trying to keep up on the bare minimum around the house. My husband even took over all the cooking of major meals, all grocery shopping, and most of the cleaning around the house. I am almost 19 weeks along now and am seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. I've had breaks from the sickness over the past couple weeks and they've started to get longer. I'm hoping I'll be able to function like a normal human being soon! :) Soon I'm hoping to restart posting here (I have done some crafting despite being wiped out), but first I have to return to posting on my family blog--or my mother would have my head! She reads both, you know. ;) (Hi mom!)
Earth Day:
I'm going to totally break the rules on this one, but that's ok. Here's what I'm supposed to write about: "List at least three books that inspired you to perform any sustainable living act or inspired you to live green, and then tell us why they inspired you. These books do not have to be about green living. Nonfiction and fiction apply." A full list of the rules can be found at The Sage Butterfly.
First, a short tangent: I'm not exactly a fine specimen of green or sustainable living. However, I think I can say that we, as a family, are at the beginning of our "journey" and as we become more established in life we will find it more and more natural to move along this path of moderate "greenness." I would say that we're just trying to be responsible for the world around us as much as is possible for us at our time of life. Now, on to the books...and breaking the rules... ;)
To start off, I would have to say that cookbooks, in general, have been a huge part of my inspiration to be more natural. My mother cooked most of our food from scratch and I picked up a love of cooking and baking early on. It was not until I was on my own that I began to translate this love of cooking into a desire to use more natural, even home-grown, ingredients. But I would have to say that my awareness of the importance of as-close-to-natural-as-possible ingredients started with my love of making food.
Next, I would have to say that a wide variety of blogs (not books, but oh well!) have given me much more specific inspiration and instruction on how to live more naturally and sustainably. I would never have thought to try half the things I have, especially when it comes to sewing and reusing items, if it had not been for the ideas that pop up in my reader feed. A few of my favorites: Tipnut (Tips and projects collected from around the internet on how to tackle all sorts of tasks around the house.), Lifehacker (Another blog that collects articles, as well as produces some of its own, on practical tips for doing things in life--has a much wider variety than Tipnut.) , and Frugal Babe (A working at home mom shares stories about her family's ways of achieving frugality and minimalism.)
Finally--it took me forever to think of the title of a specific book that inspired me to think about natural living--I loved the story The Island of Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell. It's been years since I read it, but for a quick summary: it tells the story of a young teen girl who is somehow left behind when her tribe leaves her island for a new land. She manages to survive on her own and overcome many difficulties using next to nothing (since her people took everything with them!). It concludes with a happy ending. :) As a girl of 13 or 14, I remember being amazed at how much the main character was able to do with so little. Many of the things she knew or figured out (like how to weave a skirt with plant fibers), I hadn't even considered as the basis (possibly) of our modern ways of doing things.
So there you go: my three "green," "sustainable," or "natural" living reading sources. I broke about 10 of the 5 or 6 rules, but I did manage to finish the post before the end of Earth Day. Run over to The Sage Butterfly for a great list of gardening blogs that she invited to participate (at the bottom of the post) and who all likely followed the directions better than I did. :)
~Regina
Update (AKA Where in the world did I go???):
So, shortly before dropping off the face of the earth, I decided I was going to try to post once a week (since twice a week was too much for me). What I had not anticipated was being wiped out by morning sickness shortly after making that commitment--mind you, the pregnancy is totally planned, but the wiped out part wasn't. Is it ever? For the past 3 months or more, I've been just trying to keep up on the bare minimum around the house. My husband even took over all the cooking of major meals, all grocery shopping, and most of the cleaning around the house. I am almost 19 weeks along now and am seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. I've had breaks from the sickness over the past couple weeks and they've started to get longer. I'm hoping I'll be able to function like a normal human being soon! :) Soon I'm hoping to restart posting here (I have done some crafting despite being wiped out), but first I have to return to posting on my family blog--or my mother would have my head! She reads both, you know. ;) (Hi mom!)
Earth Day:
I'm going to totally break the rules on this one, but that's ok. Here's what I'm supposed to write about: "List at least three books that inspired you to perform any sustainable living act or inspired you to live green, and then tell us why they inspired you. These books do not have to be about green living. Nonfiction and fiction apply." A full list of the rules can be found at The Sage Butterfly.
First, a short tangent: I'm not exactly a fine specimen of green or sustainable living. However, I think I can say that we, as a family, are at the beginning of our "journey" and as we become more established in life we will find it more and more natural to move along this path of moderate "greenness." I would say that we're just trying to be responsible for the world around us as much as is possible for us at our time of life. Now, on to the books...and breaking the rules... ;)
To start off, I would have to say that cookbooks, in general, have been a huge part of my inspiration to be more natural. My mother cooked most of our food from scratch and I picked up a love of cooking and baking early on. It was not until I was on my own that I began to translate this love of cooking into a desire to use more natural, even home-grown, ingredients. But I would have to say that my awareness of the importance of as-close-to-natural-as-possible ingredients started with my love of making food.
Next, I would have to say that a wide variety of blogs (not books, but oh well!) have given me much more specific inspiration and instruction on how to live more naturally and sustainably. I would never have thought to try half the things I have, especially when it comes to sewing and reusing items, if it had not been for the ideas that pop up in my reader feed. A few of my favorites: Tipnut (Tips and projects collected from around the internet on how to tackle all sorts of tasks around the house.), Lifehacker (Another blog that collects articles, as well as produces some of its own, on practical tips for doing things in life--has a much wider variety than Tipnut.) , and Frugal Babe (A working at home mom shares stories about her family's ways of achieving frugality and minimalism.)
Finally--it took me forever to think of the title of a specific book that inspired me to think about natural living--I loved the story The Island of Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell. It's been years since I read it, but for a quick summary: it tells the story of a young teen girl who is somehow left behind when her tribe leaves her island for a new land. She manages to survive on her own and overcome many difficulties using next to nothing (since her people took everything with them!). It concludes with a happy ending. :) As a girl of 13 or 14, I remember being amazed at how much the main character was able to do with so little. Many of the things she knew or figured out (like how to weave a skirt with plant fibers), I hadn't even considered as the basis (possibly) of our modern ways of doing things.
So there you go: my three "green," "sustainable," or "natural" living reading sources. I broke about 10 of the 5 or 6 rules, but I did manage to finish the post before the end of Earth Day. Run over to The Sage Butterfly for a great list of gardening blogs that she invited to participate (at the bottom of the post) and who all likely followed the directions better than I did. :)
~Regina
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