Attempting to go No 'Poo

Image via Mother Earth News

I’ve been mulling over the ‘No shampoo’ idea for a while, but lately I seem to have seen a sudden spate of posts and videos about people’s experiences going shampoo-free.  For the most part these experiences – and those of people responding and commenting on their posts – have been very positive, and there are all kinds of little natural remedies if anything goes a bit awry, which is always reassuring!

Why I want to give it a try 

The ‘no ’poo’ idea appealed to me for several different reasons:

• My hair seems to be ‘sensitive’ to water hardness, shampoo type and so on, and I get quite an itchy scalp.  Common sense would tell me that products might have something to do with it.
• I have tried stronger products to combat these problems, but again, common sense suggests that this might not be a good idea.  They’ve never worked very well, either.
• Shampoo is bloody expensive!  Even more so if you use it in larger quantities (if you have very long hair, or like a good lather).
• There are a lot of chemicals and alcohol in shampoo that strip away more than grease and grime.  They strip away your scalp’s natural oils too, stimulating the production of more and more of the stuff to compensate.  Which is why if you wash your hair every day it then looks so awful if you have to skip a day.
• Not only do these chemicals ravage your hair, but they’re not exactly doing the wider world a whole lot of good either.
• Word on the street is, going shampoo-free leaves your hair softer, more manageable, glossier, less frizzy and all-round better.  Which is quite a promise…

Practical considerations

I didn’t really like the idea of going water-only straight away, because discomfort and general ickiness aside, it’s not really practical to be going to work six days a week looking like I’ve taken an early-morning swim through a deep-fat fryer.  So for the last month or so I’ve taken the simpler steps of using much less shampoo (but working it in more firmly), switching to a milder formula (Herbal Essences instead of Head and Shoulders), and lathering/rinsing my hair once instead of twice each time.

This still didn’t feel like enough, however, and I was well aware that although my hair looked better, it was still griming up because I was still using the chemical-laced shampoo, just in smaller quantities.  So I began researching an alternative.  Happily, what I found is a cheap, easy method of washing your hair using natural (and dirt-cheap) products!  This method is widely used by followers of the ‘No ‘Poo’ movement (*snorts*  I’m such a grown up).

The BS/ACV method

This seems to be the agreed-upon basic way to wash your hair the natural way.  I’ve read posts by people who use this every two days or so, people who used it as a transition to a water-only massage wash, and people who still use it regularly, but maybe only once a week.

1. 1.     Add a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda (that’s baking soda, if you’re in the US – NOT baking powder!) to a cup of warm/hot water and stir until completely dissolved.
2. Massage this solution into wet hair, paying particular attention the top and back of the head where your parting will be, and to your hairline at the front.  Rinse thoroughly.
3. Next you need the ‘conditioning’ part of the method, to counteract the bicarbonate and seal the follicle again.  The most popular way to do this is to mix a splash of apple cider vinegar into another cup of water.
4. Apply to the hair like conditioner, comb through and leave for a few seconds before rinsing thoroughly.

That’s it!  Simple and very cheap.

My experience

On Tuesday I finally took the plunge and ‘washed’ my hair for the first time using this new method.  How did I get on?  Well…

• I used a fairly heaped teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda, and mixed it with about 250ml hot water in a jug ten minutes before I went in the shower.
• This solution went on fine, and felt lovely and slick as I was working it through my hair.  But it felt really strange as I was rinsing it out!  Like there was hairspray in my hair or something, it was a bizarre texture!
• We already had a huge jug of apple cider vinegar in the cupboard, so I splashed a bit into a glass ahead of time, and filled it up with normal shower water when I needed it.
• I poured into onto my hair, avoiding the roots, and left it a few seconds while I washed my face.  Then I rinsed it off really well.
• The mild vinegar scent disappeared almost as soon as I rinsed it, and so did much of the strange coarse texture the bicarbonate had left behind.
• My hair seemed to dry quite quickly (I usually air dry my hair because I’m lazy!) and had more volume than usual.  The next morning it hadn’t flattened much and looked cleaner and fluffier than it has in weeks!  It’s now Thursday (so I’ve had three days of no washing, and two since my BS/ACV wash) and it looks pretty much as good or better as it would two days after a normal shampoo wash.

Variations

I’ve seen a few different variations that I’ll bear in mind as this experiment progresses.

• Most No ‘Poo-ers (*snorts again*) agree that ‘the right formula’ can be a matter of trial and error.  If your hair is too flat and greasy, you can add a little more baking powder.  If your hair is too coarse and dry, you can add a little more vinegar.
• Some people use the vinegar neat on the very ends of their hair to tame flyaway ends.  Others use honey or their favourite oil, though this sounds a bit messy to me.  Olive oil might be okay, I guess.
• Some people mix the bicarbonate of soda with just enough water to create a thick paste, and work that into their scalp instead.
• I used a plastic jug for the bicarb and a separate glass for the vinegar (our vinegar bottle is too big to take in the shower with me!), but other people use old shampoo bottles or empty hair colour applicator bottles to make application easier.  The vinegar solution can be made and stored in a bottle ahead of time too.
• People tend to favour apple cider vinegar because it’s cheap, and doesn’t smell as strong as other kinds of vinegar.  But anything natural, acidic and mild (or something that can be diluted to be milder) is okay.  Some people use lemon or lime juice.

My verdict

Well, this first time was a bit of a palaver, because I’d never done it before.  It wasn’t difficult, but it took time to work everything through my hair as I wanted it, and I ended up with a showerful of floating detritus - the jug, the glass and my hairbrush, haha!  But my hair feels lovely and was actually COMPLIMENTED yesterday, which is nice.  I’ll definitely keep going, changing tactics a little bit if I need to, and hopefully trying to reduce the number of times I have to use the BS/ACV method until I’m (mostly) water only.  If I hate it, I know where Boots is, so I’m happy to give it a try and see how I get on!

More information

I think the post that got me thinking about the no shampoo thing again was probably Niall Doherty’s Showering Without Soap or Shampoo: My 3-Month Experiment.  I love Niall’s blog – there’s no sugarcoating, he tells it like he is, and I totally trust his judgement, the guy’s a frickin’ legend! - so his endorsement gave me pause for thought.

I also found helpful information at Simple Mom, Instructables and a few other blogs and websites (just Google it, there’s plenty of stuff out there!), and there’s an interesting article by Melissa Dahl called Ditching shampoo a dirty little beauty secret.

Have you ever tried going shampoo-free, and how did your hair respond?  Would you ever try it, and what would persuade you to make the leap?  Does it EVER become easier to tell people, face to face, that you’re ‘trying the No ‘Poo thing’?  Share all in the comments!