Poo or no poo?

I guess that's one way to put the question. If you've spent much time or beauty blogs or Pinterest you've heard of the no-poo movement. 

So, yeah. Not using shampoo is a thing. I did it for a year! But here's my problem: I tried every option, and they only worked for so long. Baking soda? Healthy scalp, fried hair. Epsom salts? Great, until you realize how disgusting the build-up is. Rye flour, amazing hair but nasty scalp. Honestly, I only tried it because all my friends were. ("Would you jump off a cliff just because your friends are?!" Yes, I would. I have photographic evidence that it did happen. 

Fifteen feet into freezing cold water. No biggie.) But in any case, once you get through the two week-ish adjustment period of quitting shampoo, it actually is kind of great. I went from being a shampoo every day type person to not using it at all. I loved it. And then my hair started feeling grubby again. So I would switch methods, or mix and match methods, or make up a new one altogether. But it always came back around to feeling like I wasn't cleansing my hair. Side note, I also have seborrheic dermatitis, so my scalp was a nightmare on and off through this process. 

Eventually I decided (again) that I had had enough. I decided to try to find some kind of scalp-friendly calendula ointment. For those who do not know, calendula is glorious for the scalp. It's often used to treat cradle cap on babies. Evidently cradle cap is the same as seborrheic dermatitis. Who knew? Anyway, my preliminary Google and Amazon searches did not turn up my magical and inexpensive solution. Then I went to Target (of course) while searching calendula on my phone. It offered up this:

A lavender-aloe multipurpose shampoo/soap/bubble bath?! Aww yiss. It smells phenomenal, has calendula, is not exorbitantly expensive, and is a fairly natural product for what it is. 

It's the greatest body cleaning product in the universe. I'll tell you, if you're used to very sudsy chemical-y shampoo, you will not feel like your hair is clean when you shampoo with this. But I'll tell you why: shampoo doesn't need suds. It only has suds because people think it needs it. They're created by detergents in shampoo that strip out all the important stuff from your hair. Hair has natural oil that protects it. When you strip that away, your head tries to overcompensate by giving you greasy head, then you need to shampoo the next day again. See how that pattern works? This soap doesn't strip your hair. It's awesome. But this is the opinion of a person that plunged into it after not using shampoo for a year. My hair looks and feels clean, but isn't stripped, and doesn't get greasy so fast! I wash usually every 5 or so days (with rinses every day). If you start using it from standard detergent shampoo, you'll probably go through an adjustment period similar to the no-poo adjustment. It was easy to adjust because I was out of the country when I did it. People in the Caribbean did not care that my hair looked so dirty. It was full of sand anyway.

Ultimately, I guess I have two points I'm trying to get across. One is that cleansing your hair with shampoo alternatives is great, but it won't necessarily work for everyone. But you'll never know unless you try. And you have to really try, because doing it for two days and giving up is lame. The second is that this is a product that I love. It's called Everyone Soap and it's available at Target and on Amazon. I haven't tried the other scents but the lavender-aloe rocks. If you're looking for something to gently care for your hair and scalp without giving up shampoo entirely, it's a fantastic choice. At the very least it could be a starting point to an exploration of what works for your head chemistry. I highly recommend it!