Hair

Oh, my hair!

I have moderately thick, sorta dry, loosely curly waist length hair. I stopped using commercial shampoo on it about 3 years ago. For a about a year and a half I used shampoo bars (I like the ones at Chagrin Valley best! They make excellent soap, too.). Then a friend with curly hair started no-pooing and got a bunch of us on the bandwagon. No-pooing is any number of ways of cleaning your hair without using shampoo, and it tends to be much healthier for hair and scalp. This page explains the why and ins and outs very nicely. And an added benefit of no-pooing for curly girls is that it's really great for curl enhancement!

So for about a year I washed with baking soda and rinsed with apple cider vinegar diluted in water. My hair was pretty happy and curly. But then I hit some kind of rut. I don't know what but my hair wasn't looking great any more and I still had a shampoo bar in the shower so I started using that again. At first I could barely tell the difference, so I kept it up. Then I thought better of it and started using the Conditioner Only cleansing method (CO). But after some months my hair became less curly. And then about a month ago I noticed that it was really dry, too. And about a week ago I finally noticed that my hair had gone from curly to wavy. Back to no-poo!

I made a snap judgement and decided that since we have hard water, the baking soda was to blame for my hair blahs with no-poo. Right now I'm experimenting with using sea salt to wash! All the expermentation can be a bit of a chore, but even after just one wash (I did an ACV/water rinse, sea salt scrub, ACV/water soak and final rinse with nettle tea with a touch of honey and lavender EO) my hair is curly again. See?