Lauren’s not the only one who can do experiments. Having run out of even reasonably useful things to do this Summer, I was reduced to conducting experiments on my own body. Sometime during last winter I read that if you wash your hair everyday, your scalp “noticed” that there wasn’t enough oil around and ramped up production.
I could relate to that. I washed my hair everyday, and right after I was done washing it, I would rub some sort of petroleum product back into it. Crew-goo, a very waxy product, on those odd moments when I had a crew-cut. Got-2-Be:Playful, a pomade, during the normal hair cycle.
This did not seem like the sort of thing that you would want to embrace during the school year, so I put it off. During the Summer I started looking for information on this, and was initially stymied. I kept finding results that mentioned “NoPoo”. It turns out that this does not mean what you think it means. Instead, it’s a play on “Shampoo”.
The consensus was that everyone is different, but you can expect your hair to get a lot oilier and then for your scalp to notice that things were really pretty oily now and tone it down. People said that it took from 3-8 weeks for your hair to get to a state of equilibrium.
I began my experiment on June 28th. I told Lauren about 2 weeks later. She was somewhat more fascinated than horrified. It took about 7 weeks for my scalp to come to grips with the new situation. We are on week 10 now, and Lauren has Outed me to two people in the last two weeks. I have taken this to be a subtle way of telling me that we’re done with this now. Surprisingly enough, she doesn’t want me to go back to normal. She wants me to move on to whatever she considers the next stage of the experiment.
So here’s my report on stage one of the experiment:
I decided that I would go through the motion of washing my hair every morning but only use hot water. One nice benefit of this was not getting soap in my eyes. There was some talk near the start of the experiments to gradually ween my head off of shampoo, but I went the cold turkey route instead.
I really figured that I would be in the terminal stages after 2-3 weeks. So I was a little disappointed about that time and seriously thought of giving it up. I don’t think my hair looked much different (than it did after I applied the pomade anyway), and Lauren said it didn’t smell any different. But it felt rather waxy, like I was still using crew-goo.
I kept with it, and by week 7 my hair wasn’t waxy anymore. But it definitely feels different. Oily is probably too strong a word, but it certainly isn’t dry. I’m sure Lauren will add her point of view in the comments. I’ll keep you informed of whatever new direction Lauren decides for stage two of the experiment.
