Healthy Grooming


Choose Small and Slow Solutions, Consumerism, From Pattern to Details, Life Choices, Make No Waste, Observe and Interact, Use and Value Gifts from Nature / Wednesday, November 26th, 2014

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About ten years ago, I did a complete overhaul of our beauty products and bathroom cupboards. At that time, I had just learned about the carcinogens in most beauty products, and found a great website to research everything that was in my cupboard.  Needless to say most of what we had went.  I reduced our household to the following products:

  1. Dr. Bronner’s Castile Soap (used for hand soap in a foaming dispenser and shampoo)
  2. Kiss My Face Olive Oil Soap
  3. Aveeno Active Naturals Body Wash (used for shave gel)
  4. Aveeno Intense Relief Hand Cream
  5. Kiss My Face Upper Management Styling Gel
  6. Got2b Glued Blasting Freeze Spray (not the best rating, but it works and I use hairspray rarely)

It was so liberating to only have to purchase the above mentioned items.  No more trips to the drug store coming home with things I didn’t need…no more trips to the drug store, period!  All that I need is available at the grocery store.  Our cupboards are more bare and life has become simpler.

Just over a month ago, I decided to push this idea further and stop washing my hair.  I had been growing the time between washes for a while and had stretched myself to a good week, and sometimes even pushed it to a week and a half.  I used Castile Soap instead of shampoo.  Over the course of the last several years, I had heard from multiple sources that giving up suds was the best thing for my hair.  I loved the idea…but had never had the gumption to try it.  Finally, out of what I feel is laziness, I gave it a go.  As a mom of three, I don’t get tonnes of time to myself and to be honest, a shower doesn’t make the top of my priority list when I have free time!  Also, I got thinking about how nature doesn’t make waste.  My head is its own natural system, so why would my body be producing oils that it did not need?  The answer seemed clear to me when I considered it this way; I have been told to think I need to wash my hair with shampoo.  This consumerist thinking pattern is starting to become easier for me to recognize.  Once I do, I usually look for an alternative.  Poo-less it is!

Over the past month, I had been taking showers and just rinsing and styling my hair as usual.  The oils seemed to be building up in my hair, without being rinsed away.  I figured after over a month without washing that my body had regulated oil production, but why was I still so grimy?  As Rob and I discussed it over dishes one evening, I said off the cuff, “It’s probably something that could be fixed with baking soda and vinegar.”  He agreed, thinking it was likely a Ph imbalance.  So this morning I did two rinses in the shower.  First, I took a couple of tablespoons of baking soda and mixed it with water.  I scrubbed it in and left if for a minute while I washed.  Then I rinsed it out and poured a few tablespoons of apple cider vinegar in my hair, scrubbed it and left it for another minute or so.  I rinsed and got out.  After styling my hair, I’m so pleasantly surprised with how lovely and shiny my hair looks!  I did have a bit of a ‘chip shop’ smell for an hour or so after showering, but it’s now gone.

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I want to be able to apply this radical simplification to many facets of our life, but I must work through each of them, one at a time…

2 Replies to “Healthy Grooming”

  1. Awesome! I actually have always used shampoo lather from my head for shaving my legs – have never bought shave gel in my life believe it or not 🙂 I tried a couple of different shampoo bars for a few weeks at a time and I was an itchy mess. People laugh because I’ve had the same curling iron since college, which I use maybe twice a year for special occasions, and my hair dryer is only pulled out for random home projects of all things 🙂 My friend Yancy has a great blog and books related to this topic you might like: http://www.yancylael.com/ – and makes an utterly amazing coconut vanilla body butter to boot!

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