My Revealing Experience with Sustainable Hair Care
No-Poo Hair Care
From September 27, 2020, until January 30, 2021 — for five months — I practiced the “no-poo” method of hair care.
The no-poo method means not using shampoo to wash your hair. Some zero-wasters praise it as a great way to reduce waste in the bathroom and prevent contaminating the environment with certain ingredients (e.g., sulfates and parabens).
For some people, no-poo means using baking soda as shampoo and apple cider vinegar as conditioner. For others, including me, it meant washing my hair with water alone.
During the first few weeks of my experiment of not using shampoo, my hair looked greasy and not super attractive. I decided to continue my trial because I work from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic anyway.
Not long after I started, it stopped looking gross. I understood that because I was not using shampoo, I was not stripping the sebum — the waxy, oily byproduct of glands in your scalp — from my hair, so my scalp stopped producing as much.
At month five, my hair looked and smelled fine, so you may wonder why I started using shampoo again.
My hair didn’t feel as clean. It started becoming heavy, slightly sticky, and dusty. (Water alone cannot wash off sebum.) I would spend more and more time in the shower, unsuccessfully trying to scrub off the accumulating grime.
No-Poo Vs. Shorter Showers
I wasn’t happy with how my hair felt, and I was wasting a precious resource — water.
Sometimes the best action to take to be sustainable is not apparent. I still do not know whether not using shampoo or taking shorter showers is more environmentally friendly.
Going forward, I will use shampoo, but I will use it less frequently than I did before my experiment. And, I will be able to take much faster showers than I did during the no-poo trial.
My goal is to continue to learn, be open to new ideas, and do the best I can with the knowledge and resources I have.
That is all any of us can do, and it will make a difference.
What method do you use to care for your hair sustainably? Leave it in a comment below, on Facebook, or on Instagram!
