I went "No poo"... It didn't go to plan

So, I have tried a LOT of things out during this plastic free July. I made my own peanut butter nut mylk, I tried a menstrual cup, I swapped to using an oil based cleanser full time. some were a sucess, and some were a bit of a fail lol.

So when I heard about going no shampoo, I thought, sure, lets give this thing a go.

What is "No Poo" you might be asking?

Well, 'no poo' is basically using no shampoo and using either a bar shampoo, some kind of cray cray concoction like rye flower or baking soda or just ol plain water.

I actually started this whole no shampoo thing in April (it's now nearly August). I really wanted to make sure that I had a long enough time using the different methods so that no one would say that I didn't do it for long enough to let my hair adjust or anything.

I also wanted to be super honest, and document all the issues I had.

I'm pretty keen to try most things.

Bu yes, as the title suggests... it didn't go as well as I had hoped...

The methods I tried in order were...

*Solid shampoo from Ethique

*Solid soap based shampoo from Dirty Hippy.

*Soap nuts and vinegar rinse

*Baking soda with a vinegar rinse

*Plain old water

*Solid soap based shampoo from Tomo Soap

*Rye flour

The first no poo method I tried was two types of solid soap shampoo,

Ethique and Dirty hippy :)

Ethique was the first one I used.

It is actually just a solid shampoo really and it worked really well. Made my hair soft and manageable, my fave was the 'Heali kiwi'.

Apparently the bar soap from "Lush" is also similar. The only downside is that I cant actually physically walk into a Lush store as it sets off my asthma, so unfortunately I couldn't try Lush.

The first solid soap based shampoo I tried was from Dirty Hippy.

I bought the whole range of testers.

Dirty Hippy started off well, I used the 'lemon and turmeric' first and moved on to a few of the bars for dry hair, but although my hair is dry, it seemed to make my hair feel like it had a coating on it.

At one point it felt so solid with a gummy feeling I could make it stick right up in the air.

After about 4 weeks, I had to use my old shampoo from ecostore because I had an audition and I needed my hair to look natural, be managable and soft.

I decided to hold off on trying anything else and tried just

plain ol water next.

It was ok, but as you can imagine, it just stayed a bit greasy.

So after only one day It looked like I needed to wash it again... so I did, then my hair just got a bit dry and unmanageable but still greasy on my scalp after a day.

I had heard that you could use Soap Nuts as a shampoo, so I thought I would give that a go. I just popped in a 1/4 of a teaspoon of the powder in a cup of water and used that.

It stung my eyes like a bitch! A little bit got in and my eye hurt for a good 6 hours!

My hair felt clean but I decided to give up on that idea and just decided I would just stop washing my hair all together as I heard that if you just went longer without washing your hair, then it would make your head produce less oils.

I got to 5 days and then managed to explode Basil Feta spread on my head at work! I mean, I had a hair net on but it somehow got through.

I needed to wash the feta from my hair!

So I washed my hair. this time with a baking soda paste with a vinegar rinse...

This is where it all went downhill...

It made my scalp itch and bleed! I'm not even joking. the next morning I woke with open sores on my head.

WTF!

Over the next week, my head healed, but it then got dandruff so bad and smelled weird. I couldn't decide weather I had a bacterial scalp problem or a fungal!

So out I went and bought myself a medicated anti-dandruff shampoo.

I have never really had dandruff, so this was weird to me... I felt like that chick in the breakfast club that shook all the dandruff from the front of her head and made an art project with it.

Arg!!!!

The next week and a half I spent just using the anti-dandruff shampoo.

the skin off my head flaked off in chunks, but by about day 12 it had settled down and I think the fungal infection went away.

But did I give up! No! Cause I am not a quitter!

I might be a stubborn idiot, but I am not a quitter!

Besides, by this time it was

I next tried Tomo Soap (another soap based shampoo).

I really like this soap as just a normal soap for my body, on my hair, it seemed to do the trick ok.

I tried it twice and then my head became a little itchy. So I stopped, because I got a little scared.

Rye Flour was the last thing I tried.

By this point I was like WTF am I actually doing!? hahaha

I am now going to try Rye flour?

So I made it into a kinda lumpy paste... I want to just note here, that if you can... remove as much of the lumps as possible because they get stuck in your hair!

So I gave the rye flour a go. It worked surprisingly well, which was weird. The only downside is that if the lumps get stuck in your hair they dry and then you have pockets of bloody flour in there!

The second time I did the rye flour, I got the lumps out more and it was much better.

Note: Don't use this if you are coeliac, the flour just gets everywhere!

The Verdict

Overall, I have only used actual bottle shampoo about 3 times in the past 3 months which was really just in the middle when my scalp tried to melt off.

The methods that involve a high pH (8+) on my scalp, were not so good (The soap based shampoo's and the baking soda) as my skin doesn't seem to be able to balance itself back to where my skin likes to sit (at 5.5).

You can read about the importance of healthy skin pH HERE.

My showers would also take 3 times as long also because I would have to section my hair into three parts and wash it that way.

Overall, the two things that worked the best were Ethique (solid shampoo), it still took longer to wash my hair with it, but it was pH balanced (they use different ingredients), and my hair felt awesome.

The other method that worked was Rye flour. Which I still find super weird.

Obviously some methods work better for others, so find what works for you x

I'm also not going to judge you for using normal blimin shampoo in a bottle.

Just recycle the bottle x

I hope you liked my little hair journey LOLOL