Comment on conditional soap
drath@lemmy.world 6 days agoAs another middle-aged long hair guy who has been approached numerous times by women asking about my haircare routine, I think there are multiple components to this:
Hair is most definitely affected by hormones, multiple women told me that their hair becomes straw-like during periods or how they lost a lot of hair after pregnancy and I was like sorry can’t relate 😅 I honestly believe if more men didn’t cut their hair short they’d be generally better looking than women’s, well, until they start balding.
Some kind of pink tax or whatever. Every shampoo that I tried in a cute semi-transparent colored bottle that boasted some bullshit like lavender extract, durian aroma, ginkgo biloba seeds and such, has always destroyed my hair and took months to recover. Cheap shampoos that plain-ish looking packaging(pantene, head&shoulders, syoss) have worked well for me, with no noticeable difference from the fancy 5x pricier shampoos that my girlfriend has forced me to try. My cousin even uses plain soda bar and his hair is looking even better than mine.
Less is more. It seems like every other woman I know are constantly fucking with their hair all the time. Wash two times a day, apply conditioner, then another conditioner, then a spray, and serum, a gel, and mousse, add perfume on top, mix a whole chemical lab on top of their head, then curl them, then straighten them back up, apply a different tightly knit hairstyle every day, then cut them short because of a break up, then color them, then bleach and color them again into another color, then cut them with a guillotine because that’s the trend nowadays, then straight up rip chunks of them out because of stress. Like girl, all you need is to fuck off your hair and just wash them once every 3-5 days, and only rinse on others. Then just let the nature do it’s thing, and if it doesn’t, you need to pay a visit to a trichologist, dermatologist and probably also gastroenterologist and therapist, not yet another bottle on the shelf.
You can rinse your hair with water as much as you goddamn like. Once a week, three times a day, doesn’t matter. It’s not going to ruin your hair.
But add shampoo or conditioner and you need to be wayyyy more careful what you’re doing. Now you’re messing with your head’s natural oils and it can quickly spiral out of control.
voodooattack@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Pro tip:
Washing: plain soap (organic/homemade soap is best, not that fancy scented/blended and chemically treated expensive shit). Rationale: plain soap doesn’t have additives (or herbal ones you can control/choose), any chemically treated (and factory made) product will have impurities and other random shit mixed in if they mix products on the assembly lines. (Happens all the time even in medicine!), the “advanced” shampoos are an excellent example: low volume/shared production lines. The contamination that makes chemistry teachers weep and build fly swatters from random equipment. And that’s why cheap products made in high volumes are more effective: minimal unintended chemical interactions because of dedicated assembly.
Moisturising/conditioning/whatever: a light application of natural Shea butter , and one absolute drench once every week or two. The drenching treatment is recommended for the first time though. Rationale: same as the above, plus: Shea butter is what most “good” cosmetics use to begin with (although they most likely synthesise the fatty acids industrially to cut on costs, not sure tbh), but the point is that it has nearly everything your body needs to build healthy hair (though not only for hair, it’s also great for skin care!)
If you try this, you’ll see immediate results after drying, but see the full effect after an entire week of doing it daily. You can thank me then! :P
Also don’t overdo it! One a day/every two days is good enough.
Rationale: Over-washing/conditioning is terrible for the follicles/scalp in the long term because it prevents your body from building up the natural oils/chemicals it needs to defend you from parasites and microbes that do the damage in the first place! The soap acts like a “reset” button that takes away all the byproducts/dead microbes/skin piling up due to its dual hydrophilic/lipophilic nature that sticks to anything it can bond with, and the Shea butter moisturisation step acts like a temporary replacement for the natural oils you lose in the washing AND gives the body some much needed nourishment/material it can immediately use while being absorbed through the skin.
Disclaimer: this is just an informed analysis/observation from empirical evidence, and it is not based on any actual formalised research that I’ve read or studied. (Which might actually exist, dunno because I have an allergy to academia as it currently stands)