The Hair Experiment

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.