If anyone had told me a year ago that I’d be shampooing my hair with a bar of soap, or conditioning it with a bottle of scented vinegar water, I’d probably have scoffed.
Wait, no, not probably. Definitely.
When my friend first gave me a bar of her homemade soap, she made the offhand remark that one could even use it on their hair. So, I tried it. What a disaster! My hair felt like someone had dumped wax on it for at least a week! Ugh! My hair is really long, so you can imagine how frustrating it was trying to work out the tangles from that. I was sure I’d never do that again.
After I started getting into soap making myself, I saw more and more articles about shampoo bars, mostly claiming they were pretty awesome. I saw pictures. Their hair was beautiful. I was jealous. That called for more looking into the matter.
I learned that because I have really hard water, using a homemade shampoo bar will result in dry, tangled, waxy hair. Check. That’s what happened to me. I also learned about pH, how hair will react differently depending on the pH of the water, the soap, and what you do to it after you wash it. That’s where the vinegar came in. Still a big turn off – have you smelled vinegar? Yuck! But every article I read said that the vinegar scent wore off as the hair dried. Or, you could add a few drops of essential oils and that would take out the vinegary smell too. Now we’re talking! I became kind of obsessed about trying this. I wanted nice hair. I wanted soft hair, shiny hair, healthy hair. 
So I formulated a shampoo bar recipe designed for hair. I used oils that are reported to be really good for hair. My first try for shampoo bars was … passable, I suppose. The bars were soft though, and tended to not last very long. I did some tweaking and formulated a harder bar and I am so happy with it now.
It took close to 2 weeks before my hair responded to the change. Everything I read said it would probably take at least that long and to be patient. I’m glad I saw that because there were days I just wanted to give up. I wasn’t sure it would be worth it. But it is.
The only thing I would do differently would be to do the hair detox much earlier. I kept thinking that it wouldn’t be that bad because I didn’t put a lot of stuff in my hair. I just wash it. I don’t even use a hair dryer. But, I do color it now (which I skipped this month while going through the transition) and I have been using stuff to deep condition the ends, and I did use a volumizing mousse as coloring flattens the hair strands. So I did more than I realized and I should have been doing the detox sooner and more often.
For the conditioner, I re-purposed some empty dishwashing liquid bottles, and glass cleaner spray bottles. I use a bottle of drinking water, and 4 tablespoons of apple cider vinegar, half raw and half regular. I add about 6 drops of essential oil to the mix. After I wash my hair with the shampoo bar, and rinse the suds out, I pour the vinegar rinse over my hair, all of it, not just the scalp. It helps to seal the hair shaft and makes it shiny. And soft! I can also tell that my hair is stronger, the strands are more flexible and less prone to breakage, more inclined to stretch. I end up using about half of my conditioner mix after each washing, but then my hair is really long so I tend to use more. So for the cost of a quarter cup of vinegar every other wash, I get better conditioning results than I did with more expensive name brand conditioners. How awesome is that? Better AND cheaper! FTW!
It is so worth it.
I try and post a pic in a couple weeks or so, after I get back to my coloring schedule. :)
Here are some articles that really helped me:
PassionatePureLife: Hair & Scalp Detox
Hair Detox Tutorial Mommypotamus |
Make Your Own Natural Vinegar Hair Rinse
Top 15 Shampoo Bars
Let me know if you try it!
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Shampoo Tagged:
Conditioner,
Shampoo Bars 
