Has YOUR Hair Ever Been Perpendicular to Your Face?

Last Saturday I washed with Baking Soda and rinsed with Vinegar.
On Tuesday I rinsed.
On Wednesday. I played softball. Here's what that looked like:

I'll confess to not always wanting hair
that defied gravity

I'll remind everyone that it was like 91 last Wednesday. And no, thanks for asking, but we tied. There was no way in hell that rinse was going to last that long. As it was, my hair was a greasy mess. But why wash it that morning when I knew I was going to have to wash it after softball? 

I walked into the shower, and my tube had the same issue that Edwina's tube had. It was crusty (and not in a...wait...crusty is never sexy). I added water to it. Shook it like it owed me money (cause, honestly, that GoToob was NOT cheap!), and squeezed some out. It seemed a little thick, so I added a bit of shower water to it before massaging it onto my scalp. Finished with the vinegar rinse. Huzzah!

NO. There was no "huzzah" to be had. The first real time I massaged my scalp with the baking soda mixture it felt great, soft, blowing. Wonderful. This time? Straw. If I were a mule I'd eat my own hair it was that dry. I was dejected.

The fault of the internet is the lack of
impact on senses outside of sight. 

Trust me, that's me looking dejected with straw like hair.

I was rather worried about what the baking soda was doing to the color I put on my hair (yes, I know...let me remove some chemicals from my scalp, but keep others on my hair...I know it's non-sensical, but this whole naturoo thing to me is out of vanity anyway so there!). Enter fabulous hairdresser (I'm calling her Faha from now on so I don't have to type out "fabulous hairdresser" each time) . I called to make an appointment to get my roots dyed. I warned her that I've "been doing that natural shampoo thing."
"Oh, ok," she said in a quite non-judgmental tone. "What does your hair feel like?"
"Well, greasy," I admitted, "and today it feels like straw too."
She went on to say that she hasn't had many clients that continue with it after they start trying it, and she usually tries to dissuade folks from it, but that we'd talk about it at my appointment on Saturday.

Saturday rolled around. My hair was only just starting to feel almost like hair again, but it was still straw like, and tangled. Faha lifted strands. "I don't like this," she said.
I sighed. Honestly, I don't like it either. I'm giving it the good ol' college try. If it doesn't work itself out in two months, I'll have to figure something else out. I also told her I thought I was done with the baking soda regiment due to what it's done this time. "You could try using just conditioner," she said, giving me an out. I told her I'd think about it after this trial period ends if it's unsuccessful. She did say "You know, they used to use baking soda in the 20s and 30s," I nodded, she kept on, "and there's a reason they invented shampoo."

This is the part where I'm torn between whether that reason was cleanliness, softness, and body, or if it was the commercialism that my skeptical self suspects.

She lathered the dye on my short tresses. She read her magazine, and I sat there knitting. She moved me to the sink, let it sit on the ends for a bit, and then rinsed the dye off, and washed using only conditioner.

Cheating has never ever in a million eons felt as good. The color, the color is beautiful. The movement, it swings. She rolled the edges under. It had a sheen (that was NOT grease!). It was light and fluffy and wonderful. This was "huzzah" worthy!

If you could feel the silky softness,
this photo would mean a LOT more.

And honestly, I have to say, that was saturday and it's almost Tuesday and it still looks pretty good. Granted, it's only two days, and that makes sense, but still.

Anyway, I do mean it. I'm done with the baking soda. Next up will be a honey and aloe gel mix from Code Red Hat. I picked up some aloe gel from Whole Foods (nothing like a trip to the aloe area of Whole Foods to make you realize how much you're NOT a hippie!) and I apparently have a honey hookup from Bee Raw and am super psyched to use this very tasty honey (I might have opened it today to taste it before using it in naturoo...). So that'll probably happen on Thursday morning after Wednesday's softball game. Stay tuned!

# of days since last commercial shampoo: 19 (the conditioning at the salon doesn't count, right? It wasn't really shampoo...)

# of days since last naturoo: 4

Masseuse Check: It looks really good, Jenn!

Public Perception Paranoia Scale: 3/10

I Rinsed

I could feel the grease in my fingers. I could feel the fluffy part in the back go slick with grease. I wasn't optimistic. So I used the apple cider vinegar rinse by itself. Hoping against hope that the acid could cut through the grease better than water alone. Thinking: "We shall see...the day is early still." 

I'm not like Edwina. When I smell vinegar I think of fall. I see red leaves on the ground and apple crisps in a recycled cardboard plate. It reminds me of the first time I went to the Rhinebeck Sheep and Wool festival. Stopping at a booth of wool yarn rich in lanolin and warm despite its scratchiness. I remember picking up a brightly colored skein, bringing it to my nose and inhaling it deeply. Smells of hay, sheep, oily shears and vinegar swarming my brain. The rush of supporting the farm by buying a skein (or 2, or a whole sweater's worth, why not come out and say it?) and knitting with a yarn steeped in color, locked in with vinegar is what I think of when I smell vinegar. I have actually found myself knitting more these past two weeks than in previous months. Perhaps some subliminal motivation? At any rate, I don't mind smelling like vinegar and besides, I just assume that others can't smell my hair anyway. 

The lesson of the day is to keep a boar bristle brush at work so I can brush my hair there when I get in, after my hair dries so I'm less self conscious about the greasy separation. After I got in tonight, here's the result:

Looks smooth, doesn't it?

It still feels soft under all the grease, which I'm interpreting to mean that it's clean. I was pretty surprised by that, I must say, but there you have it. Plan is to wash again tomorrow night when I get home from softball.  

# of days since last commercial shampoo: 13

# of days since last naturoo: 4

Public Perception Paranoia Scale: 7/10

Dyer Consequences

Wednesday I washed my hair with the new, more potent formula. I really dug in and scrubbed my scalp more than I had on Tuesday. Really laid into it. Results were actually pretty great.

Day of second naturoo experience, everything is groovy!

There was a breeze. My hair moved. It moved! It was fine and felt just like it had been washed with traditional shampoo! We have a winner!

But (there's always a "but," isn't there?)...

Further research is leading me to worry about the effects of the baking soda on the dye I use in my hair. To the point where there has been a nightmare where my hair dresser refuses to dye my hair because she heard I'd been using the baking soda mixture. A friend who goes to the same hairdresser I do was telling me the hairdresser told her that dye doesn't take well to hair that's been washed with baking soda and vinegar. Panic has ensued. I looked into alternatives like Dr. Brommer's Castille Soap, and found a comment by the makers that it's not good for dyed hair. I looked at honey washes, but found that not everyone finds that actually cleanses hair. I've looked at coffee grinds, and might try that next.

The thing I'm finding the hardest about this whole experience is that it's all based on others' experience. There really does seem to be a lack of science and professionals weighing in. That creates a dearth of hard and fast rules of what you should and shouldn't do, and I rather like rules. They help make it so I don't have to think ALL the time, just some of the time. I did, however, find a page on the blog: How To Hair Girl that seems to be an experiment of how the baking soda solution works on dyed hair. I'm taking solace in that experiment for now. The goal is to wash the hair only once a week, so minimizing the baking soda will be good in the long run for my scalp and my dye. I hope that it's just an issue of getting through the transition phase unscathed.

So I repeated Wednesday's process on Saturday, since I had a family event to go to. Similar results. Softness, but stopping short of the volume I've read others experiencing elsewhere. That was the last time I washed, and today we're getting back to greaseville.

There's a bit of separation going on...

I'm not feeling too too bad about this, but I doubt it's going to make it until Saturday. You can't see here, but the roots are really growing out, so that means making an appointment with my hairdresser for more dye. I'm hoping to be able to see her on Saturday, when I'll pepper her with questions about this natural thing, and see if she has any pro tips/tricks to share. Since I don't want to wash right before I see her, if I can hold out until Wednesday to wash again, I think that might work for everyone involved...

# of days since last commercial shampoo: 12

# of days since last naturoo: 3

Public Perception Paranoia Scale: 5/10

1 Naturoo

I did it. I washed with natural shampoo. It felt like washing with water even though I knew there was baking soda in it. I'm strange, and actually like the smell of vinegar (it reminds me of newly dyed/washed skeins of yarn!), so I was never worried about the smell. What I worried about was how that naturoo was going to get rid of all that grease. It worked. Sort of.

(L) back of hair is still greasy
(T) but look at the soft hair by the nape of my neck!
(B) still pretty greasy, though

This morning in the shower got weird. I'm so used to commercial shampoo that when I squirted the bottle of our Naturoo and realized it was mostly water, I got confused. To my credit, I was still under-caffeinated. Where is the lovely goopy consistency I know and love? How do I handle this? Well, I decided to handle it by squirting the tube right into my hair near the scalp. I tried to rub it around, but there's only so much rubbing around of water you can do before you start to feel useless. I sprayed the vinegar solution on my short tresses. Rinsed and toweled off.

My normal routine is to comb my hair with a wide toothed comb and get on with my life. It takes my hair about a half a day to dry, and like I say on the sidebar, I like to minimize the amount of time it takes me to get ready in the morning, so there's no blow drying when it's this warm out. Not until noon did I finally get what's going on with my hair. When I left this morning, I still felt grease and was not optimistic about this day. However, around noon, pulling my fingers through my hair, rubbing the nape of my neck I was surprised. What's this? Is it soft? It feels clean! I got it clean, it just doesn't look clean! GAH!

It's the worst nightmare, right? Being something, but coming off to others as something else.

I had to switch to Naturoo to wash my hair every day. Even with commercial shampoo I was only washing it every other day. While one wash of commercial shampoo could just whisk away all this grease, I'm not giving up that easy. A change is in order.

So, our original recipe, which you may remember from yesterday's post, was 1 tablespoon of baking soda for 1 cup of water. In the post-mortem research of today's wash, I found a blog called "The Hairpin"(now on the sidebar because it's one of my new favorite informative blogs on the subject) where the woman used a 1:1 ratio of baking soda to water. When I came home tonight, I took out my GoToob and mixed a concoction of equal parts baking soda and water. With the grease the way it is, there's no way I could handle work and a professional function after work without washing my hair, so we'll give that a go tomorrow.

Hopefully the magic potion.

You can tell the new recipe has a much more milky appearance. If this doesn't work (but if the Care Bears exist it will surely work!) my next step is to find an air tight container I can put some baking soda in to take out in clumps while I'm in the shower. I have also heard of this working, and clearly it's the most drastic case.

Hypothesis # 2

I'll bet that we started this recipe backwards. I think that our sebum creating scalps are in party mode right now like highschoolers when their parents aren't home and we probably need a higher concentration of baking soda to start with. Once our scalps get used to the fact that we're expecting them to do their own thing they won't want to party anymore and will settle down to watch some Game of Thrones with a friend and a beer. Accordingly, we'll need less of the baking soda to tame them. 

Jenn's Current Status:

# of days since last commercial shampoo: 6

# of days since last naturoo: 0

Concerned Coworker Check: "It looks great! It doesn't look wet anymore!" (never has such a ringing endorsement been doled out so cheerily)

Public Perception Paranoia Scale: 7/10

It Might Just Be That Time

Huzzah for that weekend, there. I'm hoping that it helped get a lot of oil out of my system (I know the road is longer still). I think starting this project in the middle of the week was great as it allowed a lot of greaseballness to happen this weekend.

The downside of short hair is that I can't just put it in a bun.

But yeah. That's gross. I'm trying my best to pull a 90s slick hair style with it behind my ears. Sorta like Trinity from The Matrix:

Almost, right?

They wouldn't have had shampoo on the Nebuchadnezzar, right? I did tell my husband I wanted to be like Trinity. I think this might be as close as I can get as I'm 90% sure my leather catsuit wearing days have ended.

No one at work has said anything yet, but really, why would they? They're nice people and nice people keep their judgments to themselves. I have a dinner tonight with former colleagues. At least two of which check my facebook so they might know why my hair looks like crap.

So let's see what happens tomorrow morning when I wash with the naturoo (that's what I'm calling natural shampoo since I'm too lazy to continually write baking soda & Apple Cider Vinegar and "bs" means something else in my world.). I can remember only once when I was looking forward to a shower this much. The day I returned to civilization after being at Burning Man for a week.

Jenn's Current Status

# of days since last commercial shampoo: 5

Significant Other Check: not available - thank god we're on opposite schedules

Public Perception Paranoia Scale: 8/10 I'm getting through it by sheer determination...

It Itches

I was debating whether I wanted to wear a shower cap, or if I wanted to rinse my hair while doing this experiment. I opted to rinse it, hoping it'd feel better. It's pretty greasy. It's separating from itself. I bought a boar brush in the hopes that it would help smooth the grease around, and maybe it would help scratch my scalp (did I mention that it's insanely itchy?). I thought it did a little of the former, even if it didn't scratch my scalp at all. Then I looked at the before and after shots. 

Can you tell the difference? Because I certainly can't.

My hair is slightly smoother, but not noticeably so. However, it felt smoother and it felt like it looked better, so I'm going to just go with it and ignore the fact that it's just a placebo for now. 

Pro tip: If you're going to do this, do not cut your fingernails right afterward. They will never alleviate the itch as well as longer ones, a comb, or a backscratcher. I'm hesitant to put more oil on my hair when it's this greasy, but I really hope that tea tree oil helps this itch, or this is going to be a really short experiment!

Jenn's current status:

# of days since last commercial shampoo: 3 
Significant Other Check: Said he'll check for smell while cuddling before bed. Strangely not interested in cuddling until it's time to sleep... 
Public Perception Paranoia Scale: 5/10, It feels kinda gross, and my niece definitely noticed, but I think I can pull it off...no one at the comic book store or Best Buy said anything about it...but then...