Is No Poo Nonsense?

Indigo inquires… I’ve been reading a lot of positive stories online from people who have stopped using shampoo, and am wondering if I should try it. The people who seem to have the most positive experiences doing this have curly, dry, or frizzy hair, none of which are true for me. However, some people also counter-intuitively say that this technique also benefits greasy hair. The claim is that when too much of your natural oil is cleaned off, your sebaceous glands detect that there is not enough and will overproduce oil to compensate. Therefore, if you stop cleaning the oil from your hair, your glands will eventually stop this overproduction and your hair will stop being greasy.

The Left Brain responds:

There was a lot of interesting discussion on this topic in our Forum, but the quick answer is that the no-poo shampoo method does actually clean hair. But instead of high foaming detergents, it just uses the emulsifying surfactants used in hair conditioner to do the cleaning. This means it won’t be as stripping and your hair won’t “feel” as clean. Whether you should try it or not is up to you. I would suggest you do. I personally tried it for one month. It worked well but I missed the foaming of shampoo and the feeling of being clean. Many people just get used to the heavier feeling of no-poo washing and love it.

As far as the “health” of your hair goes, the benefit to no-poo washing is that your hair may be slightly less damaged but not much. The detergents in shampoos can strip the hair of naturals oils and cause it to dry out. But it’s also damaging just to manipulate ANY product on wet hair (that’s when hair is weakest). And the drying process is even more damaging!

What do you think? Do you No Poo? Leave a comment for the rest of the Beauty Brains community.