No More Shampoo

No shampoo for a month - crazy?!

We all have seen crazy things online and I'm certainly one of them. There are some things though that we may consider to be "crazy" but when you think about it, it really isn't that bad so we can do a little experimentation. This is one of those times!

I was doing my normal decompression at the end of the day one day several weeks ago and came upon something about this guy who stopped using shampoo when he showered because it was not good for his hair and after a week his hair improved. After a month his dandruff had stopped and at two months his receding hairline had started to slowly grow back. I had all of those things going on, so I said fuck it, let's give it a shot!

Granted I don't have the longest hair, in fact I cut it fairly short every few weeks just buzzing it all off but I think the main point I wanted to try and manage was the receding hairline. It's one of those vain things but it annoys me haha, in a weird way. I'm of the age where you get what you get but also where I like to try and exert control over my body so that it improves itself rather than degrades. The receding hairline is one of those things where I want to try and figure out how to get it to come back, just because I would get a win!

So I decided one day about a month ago now, maybe a month and a half, that I would no longer be using shampoo in the shower to wash my hair! It was odd at first because when you shower for a few decades every day and do the same routine every day, you definitely have a little bit of a tough time getting out of those routines. Thankfully with shampoo though, it wasn't that bad. It's also not like I'm saving hundreds of dollars a month by not doing that, note the short hair! :D

After the first few days to a week, you can certainly notice the things that the shampoo does to your hair to damage it. The various compounds in the shampoo are actually pretty bad for you. So many shampoos and soaps use sodium laurel sulfate (SLS) as the foaming agent, which makes nice big foamy stuff to help wash your hair. This stuff is pretty bad for not only our hair but our skin! The shampoo I have used for a few years now is SLS free but there are certainly other things in it that are likely not the best for us. My hair was pretty greasy and oily for the first few days even after showering but that's because my body was doing so much work to reduce the negative effects of the shampoo that it was working to excrete extra oil to balance out the drying effects of the shampoo. Let's not forget the other issues with so many of these chemicals - they promote estrogens and reduce testosterone! That's a big issue for men particularly, where we are already suffering a significant attack on our testosterone through plastics and other estrogen-promoting products.

After that first week, I noticed that it started to level off. Now, my hair is actually quite soft, just as soft as when I was using shampoo every day but if I had missed a day of a shower when using shampoo like when I was too tired, my hair would be nasty the next day and require a shower, which meant shampoo. The other day I ran out of time to shower on one day, then didn't end up showering until the evening on the next day (thankfully didn't do a whole lot of sweating until the end of the 2nd day, so I didn't need the shower until the end) but my hair didn't feel nasty! It was really interesting to see it.

I think the other great thing about it is that the mild dandruff I had from the soap drying out my scalp, is pretty much gone. I'm thankfully not one to have had horrible dandruff but I will admit that it was there sometimes and is likely related to the things I was using for personal care more than anything. I know it's embarrassing for people to admit they have dandruff but it's definitely a significant part of what we are doing to our bodies and care routines that is causing it!