In this thread the idea of “no poo” or no shampoo was touched on.
One of the ideas behind that seems to be that if you use shampoo to remove the oil (sebum) from your scalp and hair, that causes the scalp to over-produce sebum so you have to shampoo more, and so on. Then if you only use water on your hair, it breaks the cycle and you don’t have overly-oily hair anymore.
I did some Googling, but I cannot find any hard evidence that your scalp can “tell” how much oil you have washed away and thus increase the production to over-compensate. Is there some kind of feedback mechanism, and if so, what is it?
I have never tried the no shampoo thing, nor any of the recommended alternatives to shampoo, like baking soda and/or cider vinegar.
Anyone got the straight dope on this? Is there a demonstrable effect, or do you just get used to oilier hair?
We learned about a number of feedback mechanisms in med school (mostly hormone-related) but I don’t recall any mention of shampooing increasing scalp goo.
I suppose it would make sense that if your scalp suffered from dryness due to over-shampooing/scrubbing, there might be increased sebum production in response, but I am not a Scalp Specialist so can’t say for sure.
It’s also possible that if one uses too much shampoo, conditioner or etc., that could leave a buildup on your scalp, clog follicles, interfere with sebum secretion/breakdown and make your hair seem more oily.
I’m not sure cider vinegar would do anything other than make you smell like a walking salad.
*general note: remember that hair is composed of keratin. It is not alive. Nothing can “revitalize” it. You can douse it with enzymes, DNA, vitamins, whatever. It will still be dead.
Oops, got distracted by the fizzy. I had a period in my 20s where I had really bad skin. I presumed the cause was oiliness so I used all these acne products, but things got worse. Eventually I went to a dermatologist, who told me I had rosacea, and really dry skin, and that the only reason my skin appeared oily was that in trying to dry it out, I had succeeded in making the oil glands work overtime to counteract that. Or something like that.
At any rate, moisturizing helped. Everything I had been doing had just made it worse. Although it also seemed to me that, if my skin was dry, making my oil glands overactive might have been…a good thing?
I presume if this can happen on your face, it can happen on your scalp. As I never, ever had a problem with oily hair or oily scalp and thus never tried to dry it out–and also, being lazy, I wasn’t one of those women who washed my hair every day–it never got oily in reaction.
Also, Jackmanni–I know my hair is dead and it’s going to stay dead. But conditioners often have keratin in it, and they make it both smoother (and easier to comb) and shinier, dead though it is. So it may not be actually revitalized, but it looks like it is.
I’ve had the same question for years and have yet to hear of any such possible feedback mechanism.
One thing that might be at work, beyond simply getting used to oily hair, is that oils get distributed over more of the hair shaft. When you haven’t washed your hair for a day or two (or whatever your usual interval is–some less-greasy folks can make it a week), you end up with very oily roots that stand out against the rest of your clean, dry hair. When you go months without washing, you end up combing the oil all the way down to the ends, which makes the oily roots less obvious.
As someone who has used a vinegar rinse on my hair for a few decades now let me clarify the practice.
First, it doesn’t have to be cider vinegar - I use white vinegar. It’s the vinegar you want, not any other frou-frou things (although cider or other vinegar will work if that’s what you have).
Second, you dilute the vinegar.
Third, (and important) you rinse until you no longer smell vinegar. That means you wind up rinsing your hair really, really thoroughly.
This has several effects, chief among them getting all the soap out of your hair (I’m not sure it matters if that’s because you’re using vinegar, just rinsing a whole lot, or both). The second is that it seems to act as a mild de-tangler.
Dilute lemon juice will also work, and I’ve had friends who really, really can not stand the smell of vinegar use that instead.
I’ve heard claims that the mild acidic nature of dilute vinegar counteracts the basic nature of shampoo/soap, but I don’t know that’s a fact. I suspect the practice started before people knew much, if anything, about acid/base interactions. If that is the case, it might have been more important in the past when people were more likely to use regular soap on their hair instead of purpose-made shampoo.
Among other positive features: it’s cheap and there are minimal ingredients. If you are really poor, both vinegar and lemon juice can be purchased with food stamps, which shampoo can not. Yeah, there was a time when I got quite clever with food-based cleaners.
I can’t find any evidence that shampoos claiming to contain keratin or “keratin treatments” actually cause keratin to be added to hair. The various websites claiming otherwise all seem to be those pushing hair products or science journals :dubious: on the order of Cosmopolitan.
Shampoo could make hair look better by cleaning off dirt or through ingredients adding shine etc.
But I truly doubt they’re changing the basic structure of hair.