Yesterday morning, it occurred to me that I had not washed my hair in over a week.

A few years ago, I religiously washed my hair every other day.  Sometimes every day, but every other at the least.  Day one, my hair could be worn down.  But day two, it was so greasy, I had to pull it back into some kind of bun.  Gradually, I went to every third day.  For a while, I experimented with not using shampoo, but had mixed results.  Over the past year, I’ve gotten into the habit of washing my hair every five to seven days.

Oh, and two months ago I quit shampoo.

This is my hair on eight days with no washing (and secretly, two days with no brushing…oops!).  While I would not have worn it down to work in this state, it was fine for a day of Home Depot, yardwork, and horseback riding.

When I do get around to washing my hair, I use baking soda and vinegar.  When I experimented with it in the past, I had mixed results, and ended up going back to shampoo.  But two months in, I’ve got the system down.  The trick, as I read somewhere in the blog world, is that I mix the baking soda with a bit of water ahead of time.  A couple of days if I remember, the night before if I don’t.  I think this is the genius. Before, I would make a paste of baking soda in my hand while in the shower, and it would sometimes leave my hair kind of crunchy.

I mix, oh, I don’t know, maybe a tablespoon or two of baking soda with just a little bit of water in a small jar.  When I’m ready to wash my hair, I pour about a quarter of a cup of apple cider vinegar into a my Nalgene bottle, which holds a liter of water.

In the shower, I add a bit more water to the baking soda jar, sprinkle it over my scalp (especially the underneath part towards the back), and give my head a scrub.  Then rinse, rinse, rinse, rinse, rinse.

Next step is to fill the Nalgene about half way or two thirds of the way with water (plus the vinegar that is in there already), and pour that over my head.  Once it is down to about two cups or so, I refill it for a more diluted solution, and pour the rest over my hair.  And then another rinse, rinse, rinse, rinse, rinse with regular water.

I find that if I rinse enough, there is no residual vinegar smell.

I’ve definitely noticed that the less I wash my hair, the less it needs to be washed.  It probably helps that I don’t use any product in my hair, but I think it is mostly that all of the crazy chemical shampoos strip your scalp of all of its natural stuff, and then it has to work overtime to make up for it, and then you’re in a vicious cycle of oily hair.  Where as when you basically leave it alone, and use much gentler stuff on it, it doesn’t freak out and have to work so hard.

The hair washing thing is probably one of my hippie-est qualities.  Yet while I have some serious hippie streaks, there is a lot that I am perfectly happy to leave in the non-hippie spectrum.

I mean, yes, I use an Amish washer for the bulk of my laundry, but I dry clean all of my work pants, and I have my work shirts laundered and pressed at the dry cleaner as well.  And I have no guilt about that.  Not one drop.  The chemicals and the badness are worth not having to iron a button down shirt.

The hippie side of me will tell you: “I don’t have a TV.”  Which is true.  I don’t.  But that doesn’t mean I don’t watch a ton of absolute garbage on my dependable little laptop.  I have zero desire to have a TV.  Where would I even put it?  And the laptop is plenty fine for watching even the biggest of the “Biggest Loser” contestants.

I also don’t have a microwave.  I don’t miss the microwave at all.  Most things can just be heated up in a pan in nearly the same amount of time the microwave would take.  For everything else, there is the regular oven. It may take a bit longer, but it turns out way better anyway.

I don’t use paper napkins.  For my own every-day use, I have a stack of cheap, white washcloths that I use as napkins.  I use one “napkin” for several days before I retire it to the laundry.  I have fancier cloth napkins for any time that I have guests.  And I do keep a roll of paper towels on hand, but generally those are reserved for dog barf, or anything I really would not want to put in the laundry.

I’m sure there are other hippie quirks I’m forgetting (I forgot about the napkins entirely until mid-post), but you get the idea.  I just try do do what makes the most sense for me and my life.  Sometimes it turns out to be the hippie version (yard full of kale), and sometimes not so much (I sometimes eat a tub of artichoke dip for dinner), but I figure it all evens out in the end.