Super Eco

Photo credit: sarah gilbert

It may be un-American (at least according to Procter & Gamble), but frequent shampooing is a decidedly modern development. In fact, it wasn't until the 1970s that shampoo companies went on a campaign to convince us to shampoo daily. As a piece on NPR's Morning Edition noted this week, in 1908, women shampooed about once a month. In one of the most mainstream glimpses of the often-maligned no 'poo movement, Allison Aubrey actually comes out in favor of no 'poo; or at least, its first cousin, shampooing really infrequently.

But first, she asks if Jeanne Haegel, no-poo experimenter and blogger at Life Less Plastic, if she doesn't smell a little like a pickle. The typical no 'poo practitioner washes her hair with about two tablespoons of baking soda to 16 ounces of water, once or twice a week, and, sometimes in alternate showers, rinses with a vinegar solution of about 1/4 cup vinegar to 16 ounces of water.

The big news here is that, surprise!, our American overuse of shampoo is a product of shampoo marketers, and probably isn't recommended for good hair health. Were we all to revert to once-monthly shampooing, we'd probably be just fine (and so would our rivers and oceans). According to Michelle Hanjani, a dermatologist at Columbia University, washing hair every day removes the sebum oil our sebaceous glands produce to keep our hair healthy (and, straight out of that Pantene commercial, shiny!). Our sebaceous glands react and produce more oil, more often. If the pickle smell has you worried, you could switch to weekly or bi-monthly washing, and your body would adjust after a month or two.

I wonder how many NPR listeners are considering the instructions on their shampoo bottles, "lather, rinse, repeat," and wondering, why?