Natural No-Shampoo Hair Care

A few years ago I stopped using commercially produced shampoos and conditioners. At different times I cleaned my hair with clay, flour, eggs, soap-nuts, and herbal soap. They all worked pretty well if I measured success by a lack of greasy-feeling hair.

However, alternative shampoos can be extremely obnoxious. Some ingredients require days of planning and complicated recipes. Most have a very short shelf life once prepared, and within a few days suffer molding or rotting. Applying masks can take a long time, and my hair always seemed to harbor clay, flour, eggs, onions, and other mysterious elements despite meticulous rinsing. Pulling lumps of dried flour out of my hair during meetings was a very cute look.

Fortunately, I wasn’t going for cute – I was going for clean and healthy. I figured that if lumpy flour-egg-avocado hair could accomplish that, then go ahead and bake a cake up there. Unfortunately, my hair remained greasy, dry, frizzy and split-end ridden. So I stopped any form shampooing on June 11, 2022.

It is common to want different hair than what one naturally has, but that disappointment may very easily turn into opportunities for laughter and fun. I often wake up with bedhead like Anna from Frozen and walk around looking like Hagrid from Harry Potter. The mirror shocks me into laughing out loud, which is undoubtedly an accomplishment on stressful or difficult days. People don’t care about odd-looking hair as much as you might expect, and what my self-conscious mind deems “odd” most people deem “unnoticeable”. Interestingly, contentment with goofy days allows me to feel truly beautiful on the days I don’t look like Gandalf the Grey.

My routine is simplistic, but I now like my hair more than I ever have before. It gives me great joy to only put three main materials into my hair:

1. Water

2. Oil

3. Aloe

*I occasionally have fun with herbs and honey.