NO SHAMPOO, NO SHAME
Instead, a greener clean inspires
Madeleine Somerville has been de-pooed for about six years. That is, she hasn’t used poo — shampoo — since she became concerned about chemicals in the products, the overpackaging of the bottles and
the high price of hair cleaners we believe hold special ingredients to keep hair soft, healthy and smelling beautiful.
Somerville leans forward and lets me smell her hair. It smells of nothing, of hair, but only slightly. It feels soft to the touch, silky and has a healthy sheen. Somerville uses no gels or hairsprays, just a brush and a blow dryer after cleaning it with a baking-soda mixture, rinsing with water and then conditioning it with diluted apple cider vinegar.
She’s among those adhering to the no-’poo movement, although she prefers “shampoo free,” for obvious reasons.
“I’m not a biochemist or a super hardcore environmentalist,” Somerville says. But a few years back, she saw her giant English mastiff, Gus, licking the kitchen floors after she had cleaned them with a fluorescent yellow cleaning product. The bottle had toxic warning labels.
“I don’t know what is in these products I use in my home or on my body,” she thought.
Somerville first turned to products labelled “green” in the grocery store, but didn’t always notice radically different ingredients. She also tried organic and environmentally friendly shampoos and conditioners, but the expense could be prohibitive.
Arm & Hammer baking soda became her $2 solution. A few bucks more for the apple cider vinegar, and Somerville had soft, conditioned locks. The soda is slightly alkaline, the vinegar slightly acidic so the two balance out the hair’s natural pH levels, according to the no-’poo philosophy.
But a video by FutureDerm, a beauty product brand and resource, says any combination of baking soda and apple cider vinegar actually creates carbon dioxide and puts it in the atmosphere. FutureDerm founder said the vinegar is too acidic and eventually makes hair lighter and more brittle. “It’s still better to use pre-made formulas for your hair,” Nicki Zevola said in the video.
One Interwebber also issues this warning: “Mixing vinegar and baking soda in a closed container can cause an explosion that can send pieces of exploded container into your eyes.”
Closed container, sure. But Somerville keeps her diluted homemade recipes in separate glasses on her bath ledge and uses them every other day.
Maria Kruszewski is also a proponent of the no-’poo philosophy, and says her coarse, thick — otherwise greasy — hair has never felt as soft as it does now and is sticking to her natural approach. “For now, the soda/vinegar thing is my way of managing my hair care while doing the least harm to the web of life that supports us all.”
She became concerned with cleaning ingredients when one daughter got extreme rashes on her hands from a liquid soap product.
Then Kruszewski read about David Suzuki’s “dirty dozen” cosmetic chemicals to avoid, including parfum (fragrance, sometimes harmful to fish) and sodium laurel sulphate, which helps make things lather, but can be an irritant and is sometimes contaminated by a cancer-causing agent through the manufacturing process.
“Our personal-care products have stuff in them that might not be so healthy,” Kruszewski says.
She still uses Palmolive for dishes and Ivory soap for hands, but buys fragrance-free laundry detergent from Earth’s General Store. When her hair is short enough to spike, she uses melted, diluted honey instead of hair gel.
“It’s like having hairspray,” she says, and she’s had no problems in the garden with bee swarms around her head. “You don’t want to run your hands through it. It’s a bit sticky.”
Her goal: to live as simply as she can.
Somerville agrees with the simplicity, but when it comes to the no-’poo philosophy, she has encountered more bafflement in Alberta since moving here from B.C.
“If someone had suggested to me … years ago that I wash my hair with the same ingredients you use to clear a clogged drain, I would have been shooting them some serious sideeye too,” she writes in her recently released book, All You Need is Less. “I think, ‘How strange is it that this cleans my hair as well as a $50 bottle of shampoo?”
Her husband, she recently discovered, is an unwitting un-’pooer who mostly rinses his hair with water alone, using bar soap every few months.
Not only does Somerville make her own shampoo and hair con- ditioner, she also mixes her own laundry detergent, hand lotion and everyday household cleaners with easy-to-find natural ingredients.
Now, she and her husband don’t have to worry about their one-yearold daughter, Olive, poisoning herself by accidentally drinking from bottles marked with skulls.
“I was getting frustrated (before) that ‘being green’ only seemed some- thing you could do if you had tons of money and tons of time,” Somerville says. “I wanted to get away from that philosophy. Green living is not something you buy. It is something you do.”
Somerville misses neither the lather nor the floral smells.
“I don’t like being a billboard (for a company) or smelling like Tide. I want to smell like Madeleine.”