Shampoo: Boo.

How it feels to use natural shampoo.

Here's how my shampoo experiment came about. I read a few scary articles about parabens and phlatates, and also got inspired by some people I know who have made a serious commitment to natural/simple living. So I decided to be a little more deliberate about my beauty purchases, lest I inadvertently smear cancer on my skin.

Crunchy nail polish was a great success: works the same, smells better. Toothpaste: no brainer. Natural make-up was expensive, around four times as much as I'm used to paying, but good quality. Next was shampoo.

I didn't have the guts to go the no poo route, so I bought some shampoo at the coop, and let me just state for the record that the packaging had a healthy glow. This shampoo was not only paraben free, but also made of cocoa butter and lavendar extract and fairy kisses, by a fair trade women's cooperative in Africa. In other words, it had the Good Hippies Seal of Approval.

The label said it "cleans without stripping the hair of its natural oils." I have it on good authority from a crunchy blogger and also from a Hungarian woman that this is a good thing - natural oils are there for a reason - but it does take a couple weeks for your hair to readjust to its natural state, after using oil-stripping products for a few decades. So I responded with patience when, after the first wash, my hair felt like it had been washed in butter.

I persevered through four weeks of heavy, greasy feeling, dull hair. Then I cleaned out my brush. The hair was white, coated with a hair of tacky, waxy...what? Natural oils? Shampoo? Fairy kisses? Yuck. Experiment discontinued.

In the end, I did find a compromise product that is paraben free yet does a very nice job of cleaning my hair. Please don't tell the hippies on me.