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More people give up on natural shampoo than on any other swap in the shop, and almost always in the same fortnight. Hair goes flat, or greasy, or feels like straw, and back to the supermarket they go. It is a real thing, it is temporary, and it is mostly avoidable if you know what is happening.
Conventional shampoo relies on sulfates, usually listed as sodium lauryl sulfate or sodium laureth sulfate. They are cheap, they foam beautifully, and they strip oil very effectively. Strip oil hard enough and your scalp compensates by making more, which is why so many people wash daily and still feel greasy by evening. Gentler shampoos do not strip as aggressively, so there is a period where your scalp is still producing oil at the old rate and nothing is stripping it. That is the greasy fortnight. It settles.
Two weeks for most people, up to six if you have been washing daily with something harsh for years. Do not do it the week before a wedding. The trick that gets people through is stretching the gap between washes gradually rather than going cold turkey, so if you are washing every day, aim for every second day first.
Almost everyone is doing this wrong, and it matters much more with a low foam shampoo. Wet your hair properly, and I mean a solid minute of water. Put a small amount in your palm, work it into the scalp with your fingertips rather than your nails, and let the rinse do the lengths. Then wash a second time. The first wash lifts the product and oil, the second one is the one that actually cleans, and with natural shampoo the second wash is where the foam finally shows up. Most people who say it does not lather are washing once with too little water.
If it feels waxy or heavy after a few weeks, especially with a bar, that is usually buildup rather than the wrong product. Rinse with a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar in a mug of water, pour it over, leave it a minute, rinse out. Once a fortnight is plenty. The smell goes as soon as your hair dries.
Bars are excellent for travel and for the plastic side of things, they last far longer than the size suggests, and they suit shorter hair and gym bags. They are fussier in hard water and they need somewhere to drain, so a soap dish with holes, not a puddle on the shower floor. Bottles are the easier place to start for long, coloured or thick hair, and there is no shame in staying there. Whichever you pick, buy the conditioner from the same family if you can, they are built to work together.
Flaking is worth separating from dryness. If it is fine white dust with a tight itchy scalp, that is usually dryness and a gentler shampoo plus less heat helps. If the flakes are larger, yellowish, or the scalp is red and greasy, that is more likely the yeast driven kind, and a dedicated anti dandruff formula with something like tea tree, or a pharmacy product, is a more sensible route. Persistent scalp trouble that never clears is a GP or dermatologist job, not a shelf job.
Turn the water down. Hot showers strip more than any shampoo. Detangle with a wide tooth comb or a proper bristle brush from the ends upwards, not from the roots down, and never on soaking wet hair if you can help it. Rinse the salt out after the beach, which in this postcode is most of summer. And leave a new shampoo alone for a month before you judge it, because switching every fortnight means every bottle is judged during its worst two weeks.
If you are not sure what suits your hair, bring the bottle you are using now and we will tell you honestly whether the swap is worth it. The full range is under Hair Care, and if you are working through the rest of the bathroom we also wrote about natural toothpaste and natural deodorant. We are at 936 Anzac Parade, Maroubra, open seven days.
