No 'poo for 3 weeks!

You may recall that back on 13 December I started a 'no shampoo' experiment.  The idea was to lower my use of palm oil (plus packaging plastic) by switching to a bi-carb soda and vinegar system for washing my hair.   I used a water/bicarb ratio of 1:3 for washing my hair (applied to dry hair before my shower), with a 'conditioner' of water and vinegar (1:4) with added vanilla and a cinnamon stick afterwards on some days.

Well, it's been 3 weeks, and despite the fact that my hair's oily and usually needs washing every day the results haven't been too bad.  Not fantastic, but not too bad.  It only took a couple of days for my scalp to settle down and feel normal.  I don't think that it looked too different to normal when it was blowdried in my usual style (no one but the Man commented, and that includes my hairdresser when I went last week). My hair was more greasy, not substantially so, but enough to make it much easier to put up, which has been fantastic from my point of view.   Unfortunately, it also felt and looked slightly greasy - not hugely, but enough to make the Man complain (not sure if there'd be so many complaints if he hadn't noticed the change in bottles in the shower and been skeptical right from the start).

The verdict?  I think the experiment has been good because it's made me question whether or not I need to shampoo, and in particular shampoo every day.  I washed my hair with shampoo and conditioner last night and was conscious of using a lot less - I think it's easy to get into the habit of overdoing it really thinking about how much you need, and the experiment was a bit of a 'reset' for me in this regard.

The plan from now on?  I'm going to try shampooing every 2nd or 3rd day, and using the bicarb solution between times.  The days I do shampoo I'm going to try and use as little product as possible.  This way I'll be reducing my palm oil and packaging usage.  If over time I can stretch out how many days I go before shampooing then great.  If not, then that's OK too.

If you'd like more information on conducting your own "no 'poo" experiment, my main sources of information were One Green Generation and Babyslime.

Palm oil & life without shampoo

I've signed several of those postcards at the zoo which call for products using palm oil to be labelled so that we can make informed choices about whether or not we buy them, and thereby hopefully save the habitat of the orang-utan (and no doubt many other creatures that aren't necessarily so cute & endearing).  I've wondered about my consumption though, and what I could do about it.  I say wondered, and that's about it.  It did cause me to look at the back of my shampoo and conditioner bottles and wonder what all those chemical names really meant, but until now I haven't done much else (except stop buying a product which clearly labelled that it had palm oil and was an inferior product to my regular anyway).

Well, I've decided that its probably time to do something about it, and I've found a couple of websites which might be of interest if you want to take things a bit further as well.  The first one is the  Rainforest Action Network, and buried in their site is a list of products containing palm oil.  The site's American though, and I wonder about the list's completeness particularly in the Australian context and in terms of cosmetics.  The next one is Australian (the Palm Oil Action Group) and its shopping guide gives the names given for palm oil, which I found helpful.  What I found was that my shampoo lists Glycol Distearate as being the 4th largest component of the product, behind good old water and two ammonium-sulfate based chemicals, and this is one of the names given to palm oil.

So, where to, and what are the options?  Well I've bought a couple of sauce bottles, and I'm going to try life without shampoo following Melinda's instructions on One Green Generation.  I'm no hippy, and I usually have to wash my hair every day otherwise I start to look like Neil from the Young Ones, so we'll see how it goes, but I figure nothing-ventured nothing-gained for the Orang-utans.

I'll report back in a couple of weeks and let you know how things are going!