Week 1 of My No Shampoo, Conditioner Only Hair Experiment
I’d been using this miracle conditioner for many years and a couple of years ago, the manufacturer discontinued it. I bought up what I could from various places and I was finally down to my last bottle of this stuff.
Ironically, in the past 3 weeks, I started to notice that my hair was falling out all over the place, more so than normal. I read that we lose about 80-100 strands of hair per day and we “shed” more during the autumn months but it was getting ridiculous how much hair was coming off my head during my showers! I found more hair on my pillows upon waking than I ever did before. I’ve had to vacuum much more frequently because I was shedding all over the place! 
Just a brief history of my hair: I have really thick and long hair that reaches the middle of my back. Each strand is really thick and I also have A LOT of it. I have the lovely bone straight asian hair that’s cut in layers to keep the weight down. I do dye my hair perhaps every other month, sometimes every two months depending on how lazy I am. I do it because well…I’ve been dying my hair for so many years, I can’t even remember the first time I did it. Probably when I was in my early 20s and I wanted to cover up some premature gray (although I’m not sure why people say gray when it’s white to me). Then I liked to experiment with different colors, going lighter than my naturally black hair. And occasionally adding in highlights. I tend to allow my hair to natural dry and hardly use a hairdryer unless I’m going out somewhere and need to really dry my hair. I love curls in my hair but I don’t want to really spend all that time curling my hair with a curling iron but it looks great when I do it! My niece got me fascinated with a straight iron to give it a sleeker look since my hair is pretty tamed already. I rarely use that but I like how smooth it looks with it. It’s rare that I have any split ends, probably because I don’t use a lot of heat on my hair to dry it out plus I was using that amazing conditioner that seem to make my hair drink up and say aahhh, that was quenching!
So I was starting to think that my “miracle” conditioner may be suspect to the cause of my hair loss. I mean, it was just ridiculous how much hair would come off in the shower when I would do a comb through at the rinse of my conditioner…it was gross! I probably lose like 30-50 strands of hair in the shower, yuck!! 
I went on searching for a new conditioner and being that I’m looking to stay away from “bad” ingredients, it was a really daunting task. There are so much crap on the market these days with really awful chemicals that have names I can’t even pronounce nor know what the hell they are. And apparently, the word “organics” really doesn’t mean it’s organic these days.
I ended up picking up a bottle of this “Yes to Carrots” conditioner and a “Yes to Tomatoes” conditioner. The carrots is for normal hair I think and the tomatoes one is more for volume and body. After just one application of the new conditioner, I was shocked that my hair stopped falling out as much. Now three days into the switch, alternating between the regular and volume kind, it is amazing that it basically halted my hair shedding. I mean, when I do a comb through in the shower, I still have hair coming out but it’s more like 10-20 strands! That is a huge difference! And upon waking, I only notice maybe like 4-6 strands on my pillow and I’m not shedding left and right! Thank god I have a lot of hair cuz I would seriously be freaking out if I had thin hair to begin with.
Upon a closer look at this brand’s ingredients, there’s still some funky stuff in them. Like two ingredients in the carrots one and one in the tomatoes that’s suspect. But I guess you just have to pick and choose your battles sometimes. It’s like, which ingredient is the lesser of two evils? 
Ongoing research on this topic of finding the right conditioner landed me at forums where women discussed this concept of no shampoo and using a conditioner only method for cleansing one’s hair. Ironically, sometime last week, I was watching late night television and happened to catch part of an infomercial on this product called “Wen” that even Jenni Garth say it’s the miracle for her hair she’d been using…she’s got gorgeous hair! When I did research on it, I just couldn’t justify plunking down $30 for a 30 day supply which would probably only be like a 15 day supply on my thick long hair. I basically decided to either look for an alternative to this Wen product or let it sit on the back burner for a later revisit.
Then when I was looking at the no shampoo method, someone in some forum mentioned that it’s basically like the Wen concept of not using a shampoo and using their conditioner serum to massage and clean your scalp and hair. That was a light bulb moment! 
So after reading pages of forum posts about this method, I’ve decided that I would give it a try and see how it will go. I’ll use the two conditioners I bought above to test out this new theory and if all goes well, I can permanently stop looking for a “good” shampoo! That will cut my research time in half and only focus on having to buy just conditioner. I’ll still be on the lookout for a truly “good” conditioner to use that’s healthy for us. The supposedly good ones I’ve tried just wasn’t good for my hair period. So far, I am liking the Yes to Carrots and Yest to Tomatoes conditioner a lot. They are really light weight which is excellent for my thick hair and gives my hair good enough conditioning too.
My first application of the Conditioner Only hair washing turned out pretty good. I did it really late last night, around 3am so I guess you can say it was this morning. I wet my hair under the shower and put conditioner on my scalp and really massage it in as if I was using a shampoo. Then I worked it through the rest of my hair as usual with conditioner and clipped it up in the shower to allow the conditioner to do it’s thing to my hair while I washed the rest of me. That’s always been my routine! Then I rinse out all the conditioner at the end. I think I may have over rinsed it cuz that’s what was suggested in the forums, to really get the conditioner out. I think I’ll rinse how I normally rinse and see what happens.
So far, my hair today feels smooth, tangle free, not weighted down so my hair really swings and fluffs, it seems shinier and darker too. Maybe the extra glossiness is making the color appear deeper. I’ve noticed that with this new conditioner. I guess there’s a reason why the other brand was discontinued, it really “conditioned” my hair well despite the fact that now I am convinced it was the culprit for my hair loss! What if my “gray” starts growing in black again? Not that I have a lot of gray but it’s just noticeable with dark color hair!
I’ll update the next time, perhaps with some pics. I should take pics as the experiment progresses..
