Want healthy hair? Stop shampooing so much. That’s right — Dermatologists say that shampooing your hair more than two or three times a week strips your scalp of sebum, the beneficial oil your body produces, and can damage your hair.
NPR took a closer look at this hairy issue yesterday, to find that back in the day, people used to only wash their hair once a month! A 1908 New York Times article then advised readers that shampooing every two weeks worked for some people, but that “from a month to six weeks should be a better interval if the hair is in fairly good condition.”
Times have certainly changed, because the daily “lather, rinse, repeat” mantra’s got many Americans using ostensibly 30 times the shampoo that people were using 100 years ago. Standards for personal hygiene may certainly have changed over the century, but all those shampoo and hair product commercials must have also played a role in shaping those standards and our individual bathroom habits.
Does more shampooing beget more and more spending on hair care, be they scalp conditioners, hair conditioners, sprays, gels, and the like? One NPR listener points out that because so many people put so much other gunk — in their hair, frequent shampooing kind of becomes inevitable. Another opines that if we weren’t washing our hair so much to begin with, our hair wouldn’t be so overstripped and in need of all these other products to do the work our bodies’ natural oils should be doing.
Want to wean yourself off the daily shampoo habit? Scale down gradually, maybe by switching to shampooing once every other day. Don’t stress out too much if your hair seems greasy at first; your scalp will start producing less oil as it adjusts to the new hair care routine.
Your new shampoo schedule will not only save you money and time, but also get you more compliments over time! Hair savvy fashionistas know that hair actually tends to look better on the second day after a shampoo. Wash less and learn!
Earlier: Get your hair did: Eco-friendly hair care
Photo by gordon comstock
Although I can also see that shampooing less would cause more use of product, depending on one’s haircut and desire to conform to mainstraim standards of what hair should look like.
Just removing one word from “Lather, rinse, repeat” would halve shampoo use. I’ve always considered “repeat” a late-capitalist plot to sell more ‘poo.
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Comment by meg — March 20, 2009 @ 12:22 pm
I’ve always shampooed every other day because my hair was pretty dry. When I first went on the Pill, the oil production increased, but soon it leveled off to every other day again. I also only shave my legs every other day (I fear the wax), so my shower is the same length and my products last twice as long!
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Comment by Aryn — March 20, 2009 @ 3:22 pm
I shampoo every other day in the winter, but in the summer, it’s so hot & muggy–I have to shampoo every day.
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Comment by Asianmommy — March 20, 2009 @ 8:34 pm
I’ve recently tried going “no poo”. It’s only been a week, but so far so good. A lot of people seem to be having luck with just washing with baking soda and rinsing with apple cider vinegar. I saw an article on it on sfgate (SF Chronicle’s site): http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfmoms/detail?entry_id=36992
Comment by jennyw — March 21, 2009 @ 1:47 am
I can’t work up any feeling of superiority with regard to my ‘no poo’ routine on account of, well my ‘no hair’ situation.
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Comment by Martin — March 21, 2009 @ 4:35 am
Asianmommy — One suggestion would be to just try the every other day thing in the summer for a few weeks, and give your scalp a little time to adjust :) If it doesn’t, then you can switch back –
jennyw — One woman that NPR interviewed in the article I linked to above says she tried the baking soda / cider thing until she got dandruff and stuff…. Let me know if your experiment turns out better :)
Comment by Siel — March 24, 2009 @ 9:05 am