Hey all.
To start: I’m white with Germanic heritage. My natural hair is dirty blonde but I have lighter blonde dyed highlights currently. I don’t have thick hair but I have a lot of it. It’s shoulder blade length.
I have always been an every 2 to 3 day hair washer when I used shampoo.
That extended as Covid and working from home went on and I finally decided to just try my hand at No-poo as I had done some reading on it. After a couple of weeks of basically doing nothing to my hair I got a few tablespoons of rye flour and made a paste and washed my hair and was shocked how great my hair looked but it was so …messy? Bits of rye flour everywhere… I dunno.
So this is what I ended up trying for a few months:
Water only wash a couple times per week then once a week do a rye flour rinse (I followed a YouTube video where a lady took a couple of tablespoons of rye flour and put it in a jar with some hot water and let it sit for a few hours then she strained the flour bits out of the water and just used the water on her hair).
Results: The rye flour rinse doesn’t work the same miracle as the rye flour paste. Not even close. Basically I would almost say not worth doing at all. Otherwise, my scalp started to create it’s own microbiome I feel like. It’s not greaseball greasy but there is definitely a couple of inches worth of that biome which gives a certain amount of kind of grungy volume (my boar bristle brush has the same biome in it now) then it ends and turns brittle. It’s brittle feeling - almost like if I was to bend my hair strands in half they almost feel like they would break!! I tried putting some argan oil in my hair after washing which didn’t seem to help the brittleness much.
So I did that routine for several months then on a whim this last Sunday I did a real rye flour paste wash (mess and all…ended up clogging the damn shower drain and had to get draino) and now the biome that was there is completely gone and my hair is probably 60% less brittle.
I am torn as to what to do now. I feel like I kinda messed up any progress I had made with the water only biome but I’m not sure that it was right anyway since it wasn’t extending down my hair and I wasn’t getting that “silky” sebum hair I’ve read so many people talk about.
Other things I’m doing:
- Brushing twice per day with my BBB
- Scritching and preening when I remember/have the time (I feel like I lose more hair doing this)
- One squirt of argan hair oil after I wash my hair
I would really rather not use anything on my hair and try my hand at this amazing water only life but I’m not sure I’m there yet? Doing it right? Have the right hair for it? I just don’t know. Open to guidance!