My thoughts on No Poo

When I started using baking soda and vinegar to wash my hair, it was on a whim and I was curious to see if it would work. I loved the idea of getting rid of the chemicals on my hair that have been building up for the past 23 years, and was super curious to see how my hair would react. It's been about 2 and a half months? (I actually didn't write down when I started, so this is just a guess.) And it's been nothing but a nightmare! I joined the no-poo Facebook group and tried a lot of the suggestions they had for what I thought my hair was doing, and I had really high hopes. I bought organic applesauce and smeared it all over my head, twice, in hopes it would remove the nasty waxy feeling in my hair. It didn't. But because I forgot to clean up the tiny little applesauce drips in the sink, we had fruit flies for a few days. I also bought pure aloe vera, mixed it with honey, and slathered that all over my head to try to achieve some sort of soft hair.. nada.

So on Saturday, I was talking to Cody and was rather frustrated about the results, especially since I was expecting better results a lot earlier. I expressed that I wanted to throw it out the window and just hop in the shower and use more shampoo than ever before, but I decided to post on that Facebook group and ask for help. I was given the advice to boil the water that I was using for the baking soda/water mixture and the vinegar/water mixture, as hard water tends to get in the way of good results. So Sunday morning, I started boiling water and mixing my cooking ingredients in, and washed my hair. I had such high hopes!! I wanted it so badly, and this seemed like the only thing left I could do to get my hair back to "normal".

And honestly, it did make a difference, but not a very big one. I was told to let my hair air dry before I even brushed it, and this is what it looked like after the air drying.

Almost socially acceptable.. I went to church like this.

I'm really grateful I couldn't see the back of my head all day, because it looked worse than I thought it did.

It wasn't all the way dry before we had to leave for church, so this is what everyone saw that day. And I'm pretty embarrassed, except for the fact that for the past two months, it's been a TON worse.. So a public apology goes out to everyone who's had the unfortunate experience of having to look at my hair while I've been trying this no-poo experiment. We came home, took a nap, and when I woke up I decided to brush it out and see the difference it made.

Please excuse my nap face.

MUCH BETTER! But it still felt waxy. I decided to give my hair about one to two more weeks to decide what it's going to do with this no-poo thing, and then I'm going back to shampoo. It's been fun interesting to try different concoctions in hopes of finding the "no-poo nirvana" that everyone talks about getting to, but I was told that my hair might not look awesome for a whole year if I was still going to do no-poo, and I'm just not okay with that! My hair is the one thing that I've always loved about myself.. NOT ANYMORE! I'm kinda toying with the idea of getting low-poo shampoo that has less chemicals than normal shampoo, therefore it's still better. But, that all depends on how much it costs!

I'm really glad that I tried this new thing, and I'm extremely proud of myself for sticking to it for as long as I have, since I kind of consider myself the queen of quitting. This has definitely been a learning experience for me, but I can't wait to have pretty hair again! I'll keep you updated on what happens in the next two week!