Vinegar for your hair

About 3 months ago, Tabitha and I had a conversation on IM about using vinegar as a hair rinse. She shared this link with me: http://simplemom.net/how-to-clean-your-hair-without-shampoo/, and I proceeded to spend the next hour or so reading through all the comments, because they were the most valuable for giving feedback and advice from personal experience.

I perused other websites that included articles on using baking soda to wash the hair, and vinegar to condition it. I have to admit, I was intrigued. I read a lot of different websites about using no (or less) shampoo, and discovered that people used a variety of combinations to achieve this. On one end were people who used baking soda and vinegar. The people in between used either baking soda + normal conditioner or normal shampoo + vinegar. On the other end were those who still used shampoo and conditioner, but much more sparingly than they did before.

No matter the combination, I learned that all of them are based on one principle: washing your hair too frequently dries the hair out too much, causing the scalp to go into overdrive in producing oils to combat the dryness. Ironic, isn't it-- the more you wash your hair, the oilier it gets. I read about women whose scalps went through an "adjustment" period of dealing with greasiness as they got accustomed to not shampooing everyday anymore. I myself didn't go through such a phase, because I was already washing my hair relatively infrequently. I did, however, notice that once I started using conditioning shampoos and heavier conditioners (about a year ago), I had to wash my hair more frequently. Whereas I used to last 4 days between shampoos, now I was only lasting 3 days. Still, compared to everyday washers, it wasn't so bad.

So! I decided to take the plunge. I bought regular vinegar instead of apple cider vinegar because I'd read it was more conditioning, and for my thick, coarse hair, that sounded great. I mixed a tablespoon of baking soda with 8 oz of water for my "shampoo" and a tablespoon of vinegar with 8 oz of water for my "conditioner". Since I'd read somewhere that the key to someone's problem was her hard water, and since SB has hard water, I made sure to boil it so that it would dissolve all the baking soda.

My first shampoo and conditioning went pretty well. I was surprised at how much I could feel the vinegar smoothing my cuticles, once I applied it all over my hair. My initial fear of hair smelling like vinegar vanished when I rinsed the vinegar out. The smell disappeared almost the instant the water hit my hair. And the end results? Well, my hair was clean. And it was soft and smooth. Now, keep in mind that I'd been using Pantene regularly for the past few months, which had done a lot for smoothing my hair. I was curious to see what would happen once the baking soda and vinegar stripped all those silicones out of my hair. After a few weeks of baking soda + vinegar, my hair was still the same smoothness and shininess as before. It wasn't any MORE smooth/shiny, but not any less, either. Which meant that it worked about as well as Pantene... at a fraction of the cost! All right! :-)

After a while, I switched it up. Mostly because I was still swimming regularly by this point (I started this experiment during the summer) and wasn't sure if the baking soda and vinegar would be enough to get rid of all the chlorine. Up to that point, I was regularly using Albert VO5's Clarifying Shampoo and following it with Pantene shampoo and conditioner. Now I decided to still use the clarifying shampoo, but condition with the vinegar rinse. That seemed to work pretty well, too. So I stopped using the baking soda and I started to shampoo with the VO5 and condition with vinegar.

The key here, I think, is the amount I was using. When I used to wash my hair before, I'd have to wash it about 3 times in one go: twice with regular, cheap shampoo (to get all the dirt and oil out) and once with the conditioning shampoo. That wasted a lot of shampoo and took a long time in the shower. And of course, you remember what I said above about the effects of over-shampooing? Yeah...
Anyway, now, even though I switched back to using shampoo, there were two key differences:
1. I only shampooed ONCE. Of course, I didn't get as much lather as I used to, but lather doesn't mean clean. It's just an effect of the added chemicals.
2. I only used the clarifying shampoo. Alberto VO5 is my favorite for it. It's cheap and very, very effective.

Once I'd gotten into the new shampooing routine, I discovered something else: I could last longer between shampoos than before. Whereas 3-4 days was my maximum before, now I could go 5 days. Probably even longer, if I didn't go to the gym and sweat :-P

These days, I'm back to my normal conditioner. Mostly because I went through a phase of trying out so many different kinds (most of them in trial size, thank goodness) and want to use them up. But I no longer use the accompanying shampoo. I stick to the basic, cheap VO5 because it cleans really well without leaving buildup or drying my scalp out. And I only shampoo once. It saves me a lot of time in the shower. I take care not to get any conditioner in my scalp, and my hair stays clean and healthy for about 5 days. I could probably even stretch it to 6 days, if I wore my hair in a ponytail on the 6th day.

Basically, I've learned a couple of things:

1. The key to healthy hair is to NOT wash it so often! A couple times a week suffices.
2. Vinegar and baking soda work just as well as expensive shampoos and conditioners, and cost much much less.

So there you have it. Helly's adventures with hair. My year-long experiments with different shampoos and conditioners, in my quest to find the perfect ones for my hair, have boiled down to a few of the most inexpensive options. It saves time, it saves money, and it saves room in our bathroom shelves :-D