Advanced Potion-Making (aka, No-Poo).

Why are you worrying about You-Know-Who? You should be worried about U-No-Poo--the Constipation Sensation that's gripping the nation!

Actually, it's a hair-washing sensation, which is a bit less frightening.

As I've mentioned on my old blog, I don't wash my hair with shampoo. In fact it's been almost two years since I stopped using shampoo, and my hair has, as yet, failed to go into shock and die.

What I do is called no-poo (or no 'poo, however you'd like to punctuate it.) I do the basic, which involves baking soda and vinegar. There are other methods that other people have tried, involving clay, henna, flax seeds, or other natural compounds.

Here is a followup about using bath salts instead of baking soda.

I've convinced a few other people to try it, and they like it as much as I do. Mostly I am met with reactions varying from, "Yeah I should try that sometime," to vehement arguments about how finicky their hair is and how they could never deviate from their current regime because their hair would freak out. All I can say is, how do you know that more natural hair care won't help your hair? You don't know unless you try. (Maybe I should ask if they would rather try U-No-Poo.)

The ingredients:

Baking soda (sodium bicarbonate)
Apple cider vinegar
water or tea
other things if you want

Most people prefer apple cider vinegar. As a vinegar made directly from fruit, it has more beneficial properties than grain or wine vinegars, and it's one of the cheaper options. A lot of people think that it helps bring out golden and rosy hues in their hair color, too.

This is a personalized way of washing your hair and you should start out with 1 Tbls baking soda per cup of water and 1 Tbls. vinegar per cup of water. Then you can adjust the amounts as necessary, after evaluating what it's doing for your hair and what changes might be needed. Give it a week or more between each change you make, just to give your scalp time to adjust and to truly evaluate the effect the change had.

Since my hair is very dry I use less baking soda and a lot of vinegar, and the vinegar also helps my hair not be as frizzy.

I mix the solutions in old shampoo bottles. It's okay to make a batch and have it sit in your shower as you use it, just like with shampoo. It's not going to go bad. You can use other types of plastic bottles, like condiment bottles, or you can just mix it in a cup right before you shower.

For the shampoo I mix 1/2 Tbls. of baking soda per 1 cup water.

For the conditioner I mix 3 Tbls. of apple cider vinegar per 1 cup of tea. I use water when I don't have time or am too lazy to make tea. I also sometimes add in essential oils (3 drops/cup), and/or spices, and/or honey (honey is a moisturizer). As you can see this is the part where you can really experiment and add in more ingredients to help you hair, or to make it smell nice, or whatever.

Additionally, I sometimes put a small amount of olive oil through my hair before it dries, after washing. Like I said, my hair is very dry. Olive oil works as a conditioner/moisturizer, and it also serves as a sort of hair gel to help define and soften my curls. Most people prefer coconut oil for this, and think olive oil is too greasy, but I like working with liquid oils more, and it's only too greasy if you put too much in.

The method:
1. Get in shower and get hair wet.
2. Squirt some baking soda solution onto your head. It's easiest to just squirt it directly from the bottle. Apply only to your scalp and roots, avoiding the length of your hair as much as possible.
3. You know you have enough when your hair starts feeling slippery.
4. Rub it in and massage your head.
5. Quickly rinse it out with water.

6. Squirt the vinegar solution onto you hair. Get it at the roots and all throughout the length of your hair.
7. Rub it in and massage.
8. Leave it in for the reminder of your shower to give it time to condition.
9. Rinse it out with cold water.

10. You shouldn't wash your hair every day. Even if you feel like you must shower every day, washing it with only water is sufficient at least half of the time. Just use the solutions when you can tell your hair is dirty or that it otherwise is needed. (I will oftentimes use the vinegar solution without using the baking soda solution.)

11. Brush your hair with a natural-bristle brush, or a wooden comb. As long as it's natural it will pick up your natural skin oils and help distribute them through your hair. Plastic doesn't do it too well. Because I have curly hair I don't brush my hair, but that is probably why I have to put olive oil in my hair instead.

Note: if you use a lot of products in your hair, you will have to wash your hair (with the rinses) more often. Ideally, using no-poo will make your hair healthy enough that you don't need to put in tons of products, but a lot of people don't really understand that. And a lot of people don't believe that hair can look good natural, without being tortured with heat and chemicals. I'm just saying--hair products will add lots of nasty sticky build-up into your hair, so you will need to wash more often. Using more vinegar will help dissolve out the buildup.

The science:

This is how normal shampoos and conditioners work: Shampoo has rather harsh detergents in it (such as sodium lauryl sulfate) which totally strip the scalp and hair of all their natural oils. Thus we put on conditioner. Unfortunately, conditioner sucks. The main ingredient is mineral oil, which is an industrial byproduct. Since it's not natural, it doesn't work how natural oils work. Natural oils will be soaked in by your skin and hair providing a true conditioning effect. Mineral oil doesn't get soaked in, it just floats on top like an oil spill. So your scalp thinks that it's been totally drained of oils and it's not getting anything from the mineral oil, so it produces even more oil to make up for its barrenness. This is why greasy hair is such a huge problem with people.

(The history: Back in the day at the beginning of the modern age, people used plain old soap to wash their hair. All was fine and dandy until there was a change in the processing of water and people started getting hard water pumped into their water closets. The problem with hard water is that the minerals and chemicals in it react badly with soap, forming soap scum. Horrors! Hair plus soap scum equals not clean hair, which is why they invented shampoo. The only reason shampoo was invented was because it behaved the same way in hard water as in soft water. Certainly it gets the hair clean, the problem being that it's too clean and your hair ends up unhealthy because of it.)

This is how no-poo works: The baking soda opens up the scales on your hair, and it reacts with the natural oils on your hair and skin to create a mild soap. Since it can be very drying, depending on the person, you need to rinse it out quickly, and always follow up with the vinegar rinse. (You can use the vinegar rinse by itself sometimes if your hair needs it.) The vinegar rinse restores the natural pH balance of your scalp, and closes down the scales on your hair, making the hairs smoother, which allows the natural oils of your scalp to travel down the shaft of the hair, making less grease on your roots and more conditioning down the rest of your hair. This smooth surface also helps to prevent tangling (because the hairs are not snagging on each other) and makes your hair shinier. The cold water rinse is also important because it helps make sure the hairs are all closed off, and also closes off the pores in your skin which is healthier for the skin. Seriously my hair is so much less frizzy when I rinse with cold water. It sucks in winter, though.

(No-poo does work better in soft water than hard water, but I have used hard water for most of the time without problems.)

The results:

The positive results of no-poo are many and varied! However, let me first address one result that turns a lot of people off really quickly.

Most people have a transition period where their hair will seem super greasy for a while. It's your scalp getting used to the different chemicals. Remember what I said up there about shampoo destroying your natural oils and conditioner not doing anything to help, and your scalp producing way more oil than is necessary to make up for it? So for a while your scalp will continue to produce way too much oil, until it realizes that it's not getting taken away all the time anymore, and it will scale back production to a more necessary amount. Then your hair will not be that greasy anymore. It usually takes just a few weeks. If your hair is still pretty greasy after a month, you might want to adjust your rinses (use more backing soda, use the same amount of baking soda more often, use less vinegar, or use lime juice instead of vinegar, for example).

This is a green way of hair care. Not only healthier for your hair and skin, doing this also means you're not supporting the mass industries that do bad things to our earth and society. You're not dumping bad chemicals down the drain and into the water supply. You're not throwing away a lot of non-biodegradable plastic.

It's also way cheaper to make your own rinses, rather than spend a lot of money on shampoo or conditioner. For about the same price as a bottle of shampoo and a bottle of conditioner, you can buy a huge jug of apple cider vinegar and a large box of baking soda which will give you hair cleaning supplies for years to come instead of a month or two.

No-poo is excellent for people who have skin allergies or otherwise sensitive skin. Shampoo and conditioner have skin irritants as various ingredients--the SLS, the fragrances, the mineral oil (it can clog up your pores), sometimes even various alcohols. These ingredients can be responsible for such things as acne on the back and head, other mild allergic reactions, and very dry or damaged hair. (My hair was seriously damaged from using shampoo, but I never knew until I stopped using it and saw how healthy my hair could be. It was previously extremely dry, frizzy, tangled, and well, damaged; with a sort of crunchy texture. Now it's much softer like real hair instead of polyester batting, barely frizzy at all, very easy to untangle, and only moderately dry--I do live in a desert after all.)

If you dye your hair, no-poo helps color stay in longer. First off because the chemicals are not as harsh, and secondly because you're not washing your hair as often.

Anecdote:

I went to a concert this summer which was in a very small outdoors venue. The place was packed, and it was very hot. I was sweating like crazy and when I sweat, most of it comes out of my head. For most people this would leave their hair absolutely disgusting, sticky, stringy, smelly, greasy, etc. My hair was pretty gross while it was wet from the sweat but as the evening cooled off my hair dried off, and it became very lovely and soft, with perfect curls. That, my friends, was all due to the power of no-poo. (Unless someone cast some kind of a hair-charm on me, because it was a Harry and the Potters concert, after all. But I'm pretty sure it was the no-poo.)