A step too far…

I have experimented twice now with giving up shampoo.
Mainly from packaging perspective. But also from a curiosity point of view to see if it can be done.

I read this great post from Lulastic a while back about how she went ‘poo free, and it piqued my interest.
She said your hair might be a bit greasy for a couple of weeks while your hair ‘transitions’ but then it will be wonderfully wonderful, and soft and clean and lovely.
I tried it for 2 weeks, and that was as much as I could stick. My hair was greasy, heavy, REVOLTING.

Then I I read in No Impact Man and also in the introduction of Bea Johnson’s Zero Waste Home, that they both used bicarbonate of soda in place of shampoo, and not being one to give up easily, I thought I would give it another go, but this time use bicarb every day in place of shampoo, rather than the whole cold turkey no ‘poo thing.
For the first two days I used a solution of bicarb and water that I had made up in an old shower gel bottle.
It started to get greasy so I added the juice of half a lemon to see if that would cut through some of the grease-it didn’t.
I hit the tinterweb and found various homemade remedies-one of which suggested blitzing a whole peeled lemon and a peeled cucumber and using that. I didn’t have any cucumber, and only had half a lemon, so I peeled and blitzed this and then added a generous teaspoon of trusty bicarb, and applied the paste like lemony solution to my hair and left it on for several minutes. Then I rinsed. Then I had greasy hair with bits of lemon in it.
So for the next two days I tried neat lemon juice. And still had greasy hair. Every time I washed it it seemed to be ok after I had towel dried it but then when I woke up in the morning and brushed it, it was heavy and lank and GREASY. Euurrrggghhh.
As a last resort I tried  a whole egg (NB use lukewarm water if you try this at home to avoid any kind of scrambled egg in hair incident) as I had read several people saying how great this was. It wasn’t.
At this point, I gave up.
I know you are supposed to give it 2wks + to get used to less harsh alternatives to shampoo, but as the whole point of me doing it is not to be ‘poo free but to cut down on plastic packaging, I decided life was too short for icky revolting hair that may never ‘transition’ and seems to out-grease even the most supposedly guaranteed of grease-busting remedies.

So I decided to re-group and approach the problem from a packaging perspective and look for packaging free shampoo.
And I didn’t really have to look too hard.
I found some great packaging, and water free shampoo from Lush online.
I have always avoided Lush before when on the High Street, thinking that anything that smelled that strong, could not really be that ‘natural’ but it turns out it can! They seem to be a pretty ‘ethical’ company and it seems to go further than just ‘green-wash’ so I am happy to give their products a go. And many of their products are plastic packaging free 🙂

I have ordered some Jumping Juniper Shampoo Bar

as well as some solid soap to try and replace the liquid handwash bottles in the bathrooms

and I thought I would try out these ‘Fun’ bars for the kids in the bath-they act as bubble bath, soap, shampoo and you can mess around with them and model them into shapes and things. And the packaging is compostable.

I am awaiting my package with some excitment (I am very easily pleased/lacking in too much genuinely exciting…) and will report back.