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