Friends, I have an announcement.  This is big.  I’m really excited.

Starting this month, I will be joining a myriad/of/people/in/the/world who DON’T USE SHAMPOO!

It’s the no ‘poo movement, and I’m hopping on board.

It started out like this: I have very fine hair, and I tend to use shampoo twice as fast as I use conditioner (because too much conditioner can quickly weigh down my already-limp, lifeless locks).  Because of this tragic misfortune, I have a collection of half-full plastic bottles of conditioner underneath my sink, which I save because I can’t throw them out.  See, I switch shampoo brands after every bottle, depending on what’s on sale each month, but it bothers me (REALLY bothers me) not to use shampoo with its matching conditioner.  So when I switch shampoos, the still-usable conditioner is fated to its dark corner behind the cupboard doors.

Last month before my trip, I decided to finally use all those leftovers.  I poured as many different kinds as would fit into a travel-sized container, and created a medley of conditioners for my trip to the Cayman Islands.  It was lovely.  But it made me realise, in throwing away the now-empty containers of conditioner, that I use a lot of worthless plastic in my life.  And plastic is bad (says the hippies {which I believe}).

These are just the ones that wouldn’t fit in my travel container—I threw away many more.

Fast forward to yesterday morning, in the shower.  I was washing my hair with shampoo which is almost gone, and I thought, “Oh great, another plastic bottle has served its purpose and is going to be on this earth forever now, thanks to me.” And it hit me: I needed to make my own shampoo and refill my own bottles.

Of course, as soon as I finished showering, I started researching (read: googling™) this brilliant idea, but it proved more complicated than I had expected.  Soaproot?  Castile soap?  Borax?  Rum?  Mercy sakes, I don’t even know what half of those ingredients are, let alone where to find them or how to use them.

But THEN.  THEN, my friends, I stumbled across some links that changed my life.  A few months ago, I had heard that when hair goes un-shampooed for three months, it becomes self-cleaning and never needs shampoo again, but still looks and smells perfectly lovely.  Well, that sounded like a hoax to me, and I didn’t research it any further…until yesterday.  I found a plethora of sites claiming that shampoo is worthless, and so-and-so hasn’t shampooed in months and looks better than ever…  And I knew.  I knew, friends, that I would do this.  It wasn’t even a conscious decision at first.  It was just…chi (or maybe gas, but it was spiritual either way).

Anyway, now’s the perfect time to go without shampoo—it’s summer, so I only really see people at church on Sundays, and if I start this Monday, then by NEXT Sunday, I’ll be well on my way.

Why am I doing this? Because I want to test out the theory that I don’t need shampoo in order to have clean hair.  See, it’s like this: hair oils are sort of like breast milk, as far as my research has shown.  The more a suckling child eats, the more breast milk a nursing mother produces.  Supply and demand.  If, in some tragic circumstance, the baby dies {or otherwise stops nursing suddenly}, the mother will still produce milk for a while (days?  I’m not sure how long), until her body realises, “Oh…nobody is using this milk.  I can stop producing it.”

Enter hair oil.  Most of us born and raised in Western civilization have used some form of shampoo on our hair since pretty much birth.  And most shampoos contain very harsh chemicals which strip the hairs of their natural oils, causing them to produce even more, and perpetuating the cycle of us believing we “need” to shampoo again.  The original shampoos of the 1700s (which really only meant “head massage”) actually included oils in them—later, in the 1900s, shampoo evolved into what we know it today: soap, lather, fragrance.

Now, I’m not one for conspiracy theories (okay, maybe I am!), but does this, or does this NOT sound like Big Brother/The Man set out to make billions of dollars off of tricking consumers into depending on a product that is completely worthless from the start?  It sounds sneaky to me.

Plus, think of all that money I’ll be saving if I don’t ever buy shampoo or conditioner ever again!

I’m kind of excited about it, and, as usual, I’ll be documenting the entire process here, with un-photoshopped pictures, for all the world to see.

I mean…

…it’s not like I have much to lose.

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