A great article which I found in Yahoo

Should you stop shampooing your hair (so much)?

by Jennifer Romolini, Shine staff, on Thu Mar 26, 2009 9:20am PDT

I came across a story on Jezebel yesterday about the "no-poo" movement, a silly name for a concept that essentially says we Americans are washing our hair too much.

According to the original report on NPR, folks in the U.S. shampoo about 5 times a week, which is twice as much as Italians and Spaniards. Though we've been sold the "squeaky-clean hair is better" line through bouncy Salon Selectives-type commercials for decades, in reality, dermatologists believe frequent washing strips the hair of beneficial oil, causing follicular damage and drying out our manes.

This makes a ton of sense to me. Much to my husband's and closest friends' horror, I've long thought that Americans are overly obsessed with hygiene and freakish with how frequently we need to shower. I'm also unnerved by the numerous, super-powered products we use to keep us from smelling anywhere near human—think of the foaming washes on top of flowery exfoliators on top of soap; the industrial-strength, aluminum-based antiperspirants; and don't even get me started on any of in the scary, scented Massengill-type goods. This is not to say I go out smelling like I don't have a home—I've just never felt comfortable subscribing to an extreme "cleanliness is next to Godliness" doctrine. No one needs to be that clean.

My personal hygiene issues aside, there's another reason to cease lathering up so much, and this is where the "no-poo" movement was born. Shampoo comes in plastic bottles and plastic is (obviously) bad for the environment. So, in an effort to shrink their carbon footprint, some eco-conscious circles have gone to hair-product extremes. In the NPR article, one blogger admits to not using shampoo for three months and just rinsing her hair with baking soda and vinegar, which is kind of yucky. Eventually the woman had a bad case of dandruff and started using bar shampoo (which I've never tried because it seems like it would tangle the heck out of my hair. Has anyone tried it?), but she says that, during the experiment, her hair wasn't greasy at all, it just kind of smelled like pickles and she plans on going on a shampoo-fast again.

The NPR story is chock-full of interesting facts, including how our great-grandmothers only cleansed their heads once a month, that is until a 1908 New York Times story suggested they clean up every two weeks. Were these people gross? I don't know. One could argue that infrequent washing is a wise decision in these crappy economic times, and, if one used less shampoo, one could afford a better brand. Um, but going dirty for a month? That seems insane and like you would have no friends and probably, somehow, lose your job.

OK. Now your turn to weigh in: How often do you wash your hair?


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Follow up article


When It Comes To Shampoo, Less Is More

by Allison Aubrey


· Americans love to shampoo. We lather up an average of 4.59 times a week, twice as much as Italians and Spaniards, according to shampoo-maker Procter & Gamble.

But that's way too often, say hair stylists and dermatologists. Daily washing, they say, strips the hair of beneficial oil (called sebum) and can damage our locks.

Shampoo Is Big Business

The current trend of frequent shampoos may have started on May 10, 1908, when the New York Times published a column advising women that it was OK to wash their hair every two weeks. At that time, once a month was the norm.

Decades later, TV marketing campaigns began to convince us that daily washing was the thing to do. A 1970s Faberge ad for Farrah Fawcett shampoo is one example.

"All you have to do is watch her running in slow motion on a beach with her hair flopping gracefully in the wind," says Steve Meltzer, a former ad executive. The idea was, "Wash your hair with this stuff, and you, too, can be like Farrah Fawcett," Meltzer says.

Madison Avenue sold people on the idea that they could shampoo their way back to beauty.

Ads also convinced us that daily hair washing is healthy. Remember the Breck girls? Or how about Christie Brinkley's body-building for hair ad with Prell?

Skipping Shampoos Is, Well, Un-American

Americans took easily to the idea that we should shampoo frequently. And lots of us find it disgusting to shampoo any less than once a day. Take some fitness-conscious college students from Georgetown University, for example. When I told them about the old-time advice to wash once a month, they almost gagged.

"That is way too little hair shampooing," laughs Jane Caudell-Feagan.

"If I don't shower every day, my hair gets greasy, so I think it's completely heinous," says her friend Ashley Carlini. After a workout, they say, it would be disgusting not to wash your hair.

Eco-Conscious 'No-'Poo' Movement

Given our cultural propensity to lather up frequently, it may be shocking that in some eco-conscious circles of society, some people are giving up shampoo.

"There's a lot of people doing this no-shampoo movement," says 20-something blogger Jeanne Haegele. She writes a blog called LifeLessPlastic.

In an attempt to buy fewer items with plastic packaging, Haegele recently went three months without using any shampoo. Instead, she washed her hair with baking soda twice a week and conditioned it with a vinegar rinse.

She says her hair didn't smell, and her friends were very supportive. "Maybe they were secretly wondering why I smelled like a jar of pickles," she says jokingly.

She ended the no-'poo experiment after developing a bad case of dandruff, but Haegele says she might try it again.

She recalls the biggest surprise was that her hair didn't get very greasy. For now, she's using shampoo bars a few times a week.

Dermatologist Recommends Shampooing Less

Experts say Haegele's observations are not flaky. As she washed less, her sebaceous glands began producing less sebum oil.

"If you wash your hair every day, you're removing the sebum," explains Michelle Hanjani, a dermatologist at Columbia University. "Then the oil glands compensate by producing more oil," she says.

She recommends that patients wash their hair no more than two or three times a week.

There's also a lot of variation among hair types. African-Americans and people with curly hair can go even longer between washes compared to folks with straight hair.

So, it seems, less is more. And maybe our grandmothers were on to something after all.