'No Poo Style'

While on pinterest sometime at the beginning of last week I came across an extremely interesting pin which led me to a blog that may have been the most useful thing I've learned from pinterest yet. The blog was about washing your hair 'no poo' style, meaning that you don't use shampoo. I at first was wondering if it was even possible but apparently it is. I mean it makes perfect sense, back in the frontier days they didn't have shampoo like we do now nor did they bathe as often yet they kept their hair 'clean' for much longer periods of time. I am not a fan of what's in our shampoos, even in my famously organic shampoo it has words in the ingredients that I can't pronounce, so I decided to give it a try.

It's only been a week and a half and all though my hair is still getting used to this new way of being washed my scalp definitely likes it. I was having such extreme issues of itchiness that I was in desperate need of something. I was doing all the correct things to do like using clear shampoos, not putting my conditioner on my scalp, not washing my hair every day and even using tea tree oil on my scalp. Grant it, those things helped, but I knew it was going to take something extreme to help my irritated scalp.

Here is the link to follow. It's extraordinarily detailed. I follow method 1...
http://www.coderedhat.com/no-poo/

What I am doing is I wash my hair using a mixture of only baking soda and water. I use more baking soda in my mixture because I have hard well water and I have much thicker hair than the average woman. Then since I have dry hair I rinse it with vinegar. The recipe says to just use half vinegar half water but that wasn't conditioning my hair enough. Yes my hair stinks like vinegar but all I need to do is get some essential oil to mix with water and/or tea and spray/rinse in my hair after the vinegar...I just haven't gotten to the store yet.

The one huge issue that I was having was static. The day after washing my hair it would look like I was struck by lightening from being so staticy. I had sprayed a leave in conditioner I made of coconut oil, olive oil and water but that didn't take care of the static and on top of that it made my hair look gross. So that idea was thrown out. Then a woman with the same problem suggested to me to take a dryer sheet (which smells good) and rub it through my hair. It certainly makes a big difference but I ended up buying a leave-in-conditioner to use for days that the static can't be tamed. Right now it is extremely dry out and has been under 10 degrees every day this week, so I am sure that is part of what's effecting it.

For a little while my hair started darkening, but now that my hair and scalp is starting to balance out it's getting it's shine and natural blonde streaks back.

It's even becoming not so weighed down and gaining volume.

And...

On top of that my scalp is turning pinkish! Which is very good.

I still have some itch, but I think it's taken care of the majority of the itch...my hair/scalp is still in the balancing out phase anyways.

I don't think every person on earth needs to do this because some women are blessed with amazingly healthy hair and scalps...however I am not. All though my hair has always been very thick and owns a decent amount of shine (which means health) I would get a lot of breakage (in my opinion), and itchiness. This I am banking on to help both those issues.

...........................

Right before I started this 'no poo' hair washing technique I did a conditioning mask on my hair which by the way did wonders...I melted coconut oil from it's usually white chunkiness to just oil and doused my hair in it. Then I left it in my hair with a shower cap over night and washed it out the next day. It worked wonders. I would definitely recommend doing this if you are in need of some serious conditioning.

Have a great weekend!

UPDATE: 1 YEAR LATER...