No poo? Not for me, thanks

Have you heard about no poo? No, I’m not referring to toilet habits but to shampooing. Some folks are forgoing shampoo or switching to specialized hair cleaning products that aren't shampoo, either for the environment or to improve the condition of their hair.

I could never see myself embracing this idea entirely because I’ve got oily hair. As oily hair goes, mine’s not the worst case in the world—you wouldn’t look at my hair at the end of the day and think “gee, let’s harvest that to solve the world’s oil crisis.” But it’s meant I need to wash my hair every day. I have some friends, including my best friend Kerry, who have dry hair and can gleefully skip washing their hair for days on end. Or at least they can skip a day. I’ve always been a little wistful about that because washing and drying my hair takes more time than the rest of my morning routine put together. I have a lot of hair and even though each piece isn’t thick, there’s so much of it that drying it generally takes about 20 minutes.

Recently I’ve been on a big kick to get out of self-imposed ruts. These ruts include things like only wearing super bright pink polish on my toes, wearing my hair only parted on the right, or not trying on clothing I’ve decided will look horrible on me while it’s still on the hanger. So this fall I’ve bought and used a dark purple nail polish (still not entirely comfortable with that color yet), and I’ve tried on a cowl neck shirt even though I was positive it would look awful on me (I was wrong and I got the shirt). Yesterday I decided I would try not shampooing my hair.

I put my hair up in a clip, took an otherwise normal shower and followed the rest of my morning routine regarding clothes, make up and so on. I was tickled to gain the extra time normally devoted to fixing my hair.

And that’s the end of the positive report. Even though every other bit of me was entirely clean, I felt ultra greasy all day long. Plus my hair, which normally looks good when it’s put up, just looked nasty. Or maybe that's the greasy feeling affecting me. All I know is that this morning’s shampoo never felt so good.

Can you skip days for hair washing? If you can, then know I’m a tiny bit jealous. But I’m not jealous enough to try that again. At least not for another 10 years or so.