For the last year or so I’ve been conducting an experiment
on my hair, trying to get to the bottom of the various problems it has
developed over the years. That is to say, I’ve been dealing with what I could
only conclude as the adverse affects of daily shampooing: dandruff; oily hair;
frizzy strands, etc. Now, the combination of greasiness and dandruff leads to,
well, the dandruff being ever more difficult to get under control as it sticks
to oily hair like white cat fur to black pants. I tried all sorts of homemade
remedies to neutralize the dandruff from coconut oil to Epsom salt to tea tree
oil to whatever else Pinterest and Google had to offer, but it was to no avail.
The dandruff continued. The greasy hair persisted. The frizzy strands grew ever
more present.
I was left with two options: First, keep my hair short, as
in between a half to one inch at all times so the dandruff wasn’t as
noticeable; or Second, give in and buy dandruff shampoo. I chose the latter. As
much as I wanted to do this without the use of harsh chemicals, the situation
brewing since I was a child required, well, to say the least, a strong hand. In
the end, I chose to go with Selsun Blue Naturals. I knew going in to this that
it would require weeks of my hair looking like crap, but I also wanted a clean
slate before I took on the next part of this experiment, going shampoo-less.
Using Selsun Blue seemed to strip my hair of all life the
first few times I used it, but my dandruff issues were becoming less and less
apparent. And so for a couple months I washed my hair once a week with this
shampoo and nothing else. The rest of the week I simply did the motions of
shampooing to rinse out the fruit pectin based styling product I use. After the
dandruff seemed to subside, I stopped using shampoo all together. For the first
few weeks my hair seemed a little bit greasier than normal, but my scalp was no
longer itchy. The hardest part was to resist the urge to simply wash out the
extra oils and allow my scalp to figure out the right balance on its own. And
now it has. The once frizzy fragile white hairs that were slowly taking over my
dark brown tresses are now just as straight and healthy looking as the rest. It’d
be great if they weren’t white and were, perhaps, silver or something in the
gray tones, but alas, genetics.
It has now been six weeks since I’ve washed my hair in anything
but water, and it has never looked better. The dandruff has been eradicated, it
feels incredibly soft and touchable, and all of the scalp issues I’ve dealt
with since hitting puberty have been vanquished. It makes me question, if going
soapless on my head has yielded such great results, I wonder if I should think
about finding a soap-free cleanser for my skin to see if it will clear up the
patches of eczema,sections of oily skin, and that damned acne problem. I smell another
experiment in the not-so-distant future.
