I have been doing my part for decades but the one thing I can’t wrap my head around is when people say that they can clean their hair with water only. I have been reading about it on this forum for years but don’t know how you get your hair actually clean without some form of shampoo or soap.
You mean me? I've been the main one mentioning it the most here for years. If so, just add it to the pile of things about me that you've already said you find weird or unrealistic or whatever.
For anyone else reading who is interested, yes, it's very easy to get hair clean with just water, but it does depend on what you consider "clean."
My hair is never stripped of oils, but that's the whole point. There's no reason to strip oil from your hair, and the less you do, the less oily your hair gets over time.
Washing your hair and scalp with detergents is very harsh, which is why most people need to add piles of moisturizers and silicones onto their hair to get it to be reasonably soft/manageable after washing, but those substances are very hard to wash out, which is why shampoos have such harsh detergents. It's not to get rid of the dirt in your hair, most of that is water soluble, it's to get rid of the deposits of silicone.
Even then, a lot of people need to use a "clarifying" shampoo when the buildup makes hair all ruddy and uncooperative because silicone and sebum don't play well together. Which means using an even harsher shampoo that itself doesn't contain any silicone.
With water-only, you do have to manually exfoliate your scalp, which I do with a scalp massager. Harsh detergents normally wash this away, so it has to be helped along mechanically. The no-poo community call this "scritching" and "cleaning," which always reminds me of rats. Which I'm cool with because rats are phenomenally clean animals who manage to smell nice despite not using shampoo.
This is a thing, there are a ton of Reddit threads asking why rats smell so nice, lol.
https://www.reddit.com/r/RATS/comments/qvmsk7/why_do_my_rats_smell_good/Because, as I said, hair dirt is water soluble, it's very easy to have clean hair with just water. A thin coating of sebum oil stays on the hair shaft, but this oil doesn't need to be removed, the same way it doesn't need to be removed from your face, which is why the best face cleansers leave that layer intact.
If you don't use industrial chemicals on your face, you can also just wash your face with water, which is still a well known, old school beauty regimen.
It's important to note that when you stop aggressively stripping your scalp (or face) of sebum, it stops over producing it, and it totally stops being liquidy/greasy. So that wet, soggy, greasy hair phenomenon is more a product of shampoo than a reason to use it. That soggy, sticky oil traps dirt and crap much, much more. So washing your hair makes it much more gross.
Instead it has more of a wax-like texture that thoroughly coats the hair strand in a very thin layer, making hair thicker, less frizzy, and easier to manage.
For many people it also helps with the fungus/bacteria balance of the scalp because it's a much more stable microbiome not being blasted with detergents.
Many people who can't imagine it working are thinking about how their scalp behaves under conditions of constantly being stripped with harsh detergents and then smothered with thick emollients and silicones. And yes, it takes a good 6 weeks of gross, smelly, greasy, nasty-ass hair and scalp for the whole system to calm down and adjust.
Also, people who don't know to clarify first end up with really, really gross hair because of the silicone deposits left in the hair and how they react with the increasingly waxy oil, which is disgusting and extremely sticky. Remember, silicone and sebum do NOT play well together.
So you get a lot of people experimenting with it for a week or two, getting overwhelmingly gross, sticky, filthy hair and giving up.
I learned this the hard way. I tried for 2 months and my hair just got worse and worse until my fiance at the time insisted I wash it. That's when I found out about the clarifying part. After that, I transitioned just fine, and I've been doing it one and off for over a decade with no spousal complaints. In fact, DH has recently switched over to only shampooing once a month, and only with silicone free shampoo, and only using jojoba oil as conditioner (closest oil to sebum). He has sensitive skin and was getting an itchy, dry scalp with most shampoos he tried, so he wanted to try it.
Funnily enough, I'm currently washing my hair with shampoo because my scalp seems to be doing something insane with the ultra high humidity in Newfoundland and I have sporadic psoriasis that has flared up, so I have to use tar shampoo. But I hate it because my hair gets so greasy and dirty in like a day now. It goes from being way too dry and frizzy the day I wash it to nice for about half a day, then to gross and greasy in the snap of a finger. I really hate it. I typically like to run my hands through my hair and now they come out greasy, it's so gross.
FTR, there are folks who don't even use water. They build up their soft, smooth waxy layer and then clean their hair daily by using a boar bristle brush.
This is where that old tradition of brushing your hair with 100 strokes every evening comes from, and is most commonly practiced in some of the traditional long hair communities. This is called sebum-only haircare. The boar bristles are so densely packed in the brush that they'll remove any excess sebum and dirt/skin cells from the hair, leaving just the thinnest sheen of sebum, and nice smooth hair.
For the ultra long hair folks of Nordic descent, even getting hair that long wet will lead to breakage from the weight alone and how fragile the strands are at the end after so many years.
When I started playing with water only, which I actually did in an effort to control my psoriasis, which it did really well until recently (thanks healthy microbiome!), I ended up chatting online with an American Amish girl. They're not allowed to cut their hair at all, ever. Because of their Nordic ancestry, their hair is super fine and fragile, so it gets very easily damaged, and preventing split ends is critical, otherwise they can end up with a giant, frizzy, knotted mess that they're not allowed to cut. So a lot of them never wet their hair because the risk of breakage and splits would be too high.
That's everyone's fun facts about hair for today.
