Your first reaction, conditioned by years of being exposed to advertising and so called common knowledge telling you "you are unclean without soap", might understandably be: Ewwwww!
Seriously. Throw away the soap.
I can only relate some facts about soap and skin, my own anecdotal personal experience and that of countless people in the world wide web.
First up, a few facts.
- Dirt and sweat from a day's work reside on the skin's outer surface.
- Most hygiene products (shampoos, soaps, etc) today use either regular soap or synthesized detergents in varying concentrations.
- Soaps and detergents are drying alkalizing agents that dissolve all the natural skin oils. And, with hot water, penetrate the open pores and dissolve even more of the skin oils.
- Natural skin balance is a slightly acidic pH of 5.5.
- When forced into an unnatural basic pH, skin will respond by producing more natural protective skin secretions: oil. The more basic the skin is, the more frantically it tries to restore the balance by producing ever more increasing amounts of oil until it hits its physical production cap. Congratulations people with oily hair! You've just found your way to the end of that vicious cycle. You've successfully found that dream shampoo that is too strong for your skin to fight anymore.
So what exactly happens when we remove soap from the equation? Well I'll just share my own personal experience.
I've not used any soap of any kind for quite a few weeks now except for my hands. My only cleaning act was to scrub my body with a loofah or wash cloth under warm to hot water depending on the weather. Scrubbing takes away the outer most layer of dead skin, and along with any dirt that may be on your body.
My skin has never, and I mean never, been softer or healthier looking despite living in this dry dry weather. It smells just great. Especially when I use my rose water conditioner, but more on that later.
Just to further my case, I had a small expensive bottle of "Burt's Bees baby shampoo and body wash" and I used it in the shower just today. Result? Well, I'm never doing that again. My skin feels dry and a bit itchy, despite the fact that I had a few months ago stopped using it because it was "too light". We use this stuff for newborn babies? Because we all know babies are smelly things that roll around in grease all day! Sheeesh.
Hair is a little trickier. The reason being of course that your body's skin is easily accessible and scrubbed, and it has limited capacity to produce oils. The skin on your scalp? Well that baby is buried beneath mounds of hair and has a seemingly endless capacity to create problems for people, from oiliness, dandruff, you name it. Plus the fact, we want our hair to look perfect, all the time.
The thing is in most cases, dandruff and oily hair are caused by using shampoos and soaps. Yes, even that local made old fashioned soap. Do you think those unlucky oily haired humans have been walking around with gross oily hair for tens thousands of years waiting for somebody to invent soap? I assure you sexual natural selection would've gotten rid of that little snag. I've never seen a sheep with oily looking wool because the poor thing's skin just produced too much lanolin. Why would humans have such a thing? The idea runs counter to the natural state of balance the describes our bodies.
The hardest part is breaking the vicious cycle. Once you stop using shampoo, the scalp gets really oily until it readjusts. For most it happens within two weeks, for others it might take a month or two.
So how does it work? Well at one point 2 years ago I was doing absolutely great with washing my hair once week with a little baking soda solution (1 Tbs. dissolved in 1 cup hot water and then cooled) I follow that by rinsing it with a little bit of 1 Tbs. apple cider vinegar dissolved in 1 cup of water. During the week I would wash it only with warm water. One batch of baking soda and vinegar lasted about a month. Of course, at that point I was only motivated by getting good looking hair. It's a popular growing thing called "no 'pooing". Once I moved to the U.S., I accidentally found myself lured back by those pretty displays of organic and natural shampoos at Whole Foods and I fell off the wagon. Not too long after, I started yet again complaining to Hala of dandruff and oily hair. My hair which had needed a light washing once a week, now needed a strong anti-dandruff shampoo every 2 days.
So now a wiser "learned my lesson" me is back on the wagon and is throwing away the soap. I look forward to facing my rough scalp readjusting period, and getting back to good hair and skin.
Now some people out there have reached that "envy-worthy" stage where they say they no longer use anything but water on their hair and have great hair. This time, I'm feeling ambitious, brave, and experimental, so, I'm quitting everything cold-turkey.
I will hopefully remain on the wagon and post a two month update and a six month update.
Viva la water :P
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