I have a confession to make. I haven't used shampoo in a month. No, this isn't a "pandemic-hair, I don't care" moment. This came about because I was searching for a way to tame my unruly, naturally curly and frizzy hair. Well, it turns out that the naturally curly part is something I'm stuck with, but not the naturally frizzy part.
About a month ago, I read about the curly girl hair method. Curly hair tends to be dry, as scalp oils don't slip down the hair shafts as easily on curly hair as on straight hair. To add to this, I color my hair, which increases the dryness. Well, dry hair attracts moisture from the air, leading to frizz.
So, one of the ideas behind the curly girl method is to "heal" some of that dryness by skipping traditional shampoos (which contain oil-stripping and drying ingredients) and wash the hair either with a sulfate and paraben-free shampoo or wash hair with a conditioner. It turns out that conditioners have enough of the cleansing agents needed to actually wash away dirt and bacteria and get the hair clean. (I never knew that!) The sulfate and paraben-free shampoos tend to be expensive, so I opted for washing with conditioner only. The bonus is since I'm "shampooing" with conditioner, my hair color (from a box) doesn't seem to be fading as fast. The sulfates in traditional drugstore shampoos are a no-no for colored hair, as they strip color while stripping oils.
There's more to the curly girl method, such as using gels to hold the curl in and never brushing the hair. But for now, I'm sticking with just my co-washing (washing with conditioner only).
What I thought would happen
I thought that my hair would feel greasy or I'd develop dandruff. It didn't and I didn't. I thought I would need to co-wash my hair more often than I'd been shampooing with regular shampoo. I didn't. To clean my scalp, I use my fingertips to scrub the conditioner into the scalp, then rinse thoroughly before adding a bit more conditioner to the ends. In spite of my fears, I wound up with soft hair that feels and looks clean and appears to be improving significantly in the frizz department.
This doesn't surprise me
The success of using conditioner to clean my hair doesn't really surprise me all that much. About 15 years ago, I stopped using facial cleanser to wash my face. After struggling with some small patches of facial eczema for about a dozen years, I decided to ditch the cleansers and just "wash" my face with my moisturizer (a drugstore moisturizing lotion, not necessarily for the face only, but recommended for eczema). Like the hair and shampoo, I thought I might have to deal with break-outs or greasy-looking skin. I didn't. I used the lotion to wash my face, then rinsed with water before patting dry and applying a small amount of new moisturizer. The eczema flare-ups are few and far between, now, and mostly related to trying cosmetics to which I'm allergic. The bonus is my face never looks red or ruddy any more. I think that facial cleansers (even the expensive ones that are meant for dry skin) were simply too irritating for my sensitive facial skin. As I've gotten older and my skin has become a little more dry, I've switched to the heavier moisturizing cream by the same company (CeraVe, in case you're curious). Whether this is just good genes or ditching the facial cleansers, I do get a lot of comments that my skin looks young for my age. I hope that with even more time of co-washing my hair, its texture will improve to the point of just looking and feeling like normal, healthy hair, instead of always looking like it's been damaged. And maybe I can cut back on future purchases of expensive hair masks.
Do you remember when I said, "I also discovered that we can stop buying hair conditioner now. I think I have enough hair conditioner to get through this pandemic and the next one." Well, I now know how I'll be using up this surplus of hair conditioner.
Co-washing isn't recommended for straight, fine, and/or oily hair, although I have found a few women with thick and barely wavy hair that say co-washing works for their hair type, too.
Has anybody, here, used conditioner instead of shampoo? What were your results?
