So, I’ve been doing this no-shampoo (I have a very difficult time saying “no poo” without making a toilet reference) and no-facewash experiment for nine days now. Here’s what’s been happening:
Since my hair is SO thin and baby-fine, and my scalp is generally oily, I was terrified at first. However, I did what all the blogs and articles say to do: brush until your arm falls off. It took about five days for the sebum (hair oil) to reach the ends of my hair with the help of my boar bristle brush (BBB). This process was the worst part so far. Of course my hair was flat and looked a bit greasy, but I feel like scrubbing with the rye flour helped mitigate the gunky feeling. And, I believe it was on day 5, when I finally felt like I had waited long enough, I did do a little baking soda “wash” on my scalp. So that gave me a little more bounce.
Also, to help with the flatness, I made a water and epsom salt mixture in a spray bottle and spritzed my roots with it. It worked very nicely with the natural wave in my hair, and added body. I used the epsom salt that had lavender essential oil in it, so it gave my hair a little bit of a flowery scent, too.
Finally on day eight, I woke up and ran my fingers through my hair to see how funky it was feeling that day, and I realized that my hair didn’t feel oily! Not at all! I was pretty shocked…especially considering the fact that almost every personal account I’ve read of women that do this says that it could take weeks or even months to reach the point where the hair no longer looks and feels oily. But like I’ve said, my hair is ultra thin and fine.
So, while I’m still waiting for the natural body to magically appear in my hair, the “gross” feeling is gone (unless this is for some reason a temporary thing).
Now, the day after I stopped using shampoo, I decided to give up facewash, too. I started using the rye flour for that, also. Now mind you, while my skin has never been super-bad like the “before” pictures on the Proactive commercials, I did start having acne issues a couple of years ago (which I found profoundly weird and annoying since I’m nowhere near my teen years anymore).
Well, after two days of only washing my face once a day with the flour (and dabbing the super-oily spots with highly-diluted apple cider vinegar once a day), my skin started to clear up, and I have been dumbfounded ever since. All this time I’ve been going through bottles and tubes of CRAP trying to get my face to look normal again…and evidently all I needed to do was to STOP washing it! And, P.S. I still wear makeup. The same makeup I was using before. Nothing special.
It’s been a little difficult getting used to not scrubbing the crap out of my face every morning and night, and getting that “squeaky-clean” feeling that I’m used to. But NOT waking up to new blemishes every morning has made it COMPLETELY worth it.
This link kinda makes me feel validated…although I’m avoiding the initial 60-days-without-water-touching-my-face thing. I just don’t think I could go full-on caveman regimen:
xojane
Crunchy Notes 