Does hair actually self-clean itself?

When it comes to hair, there’s plenty to debate about. Does it actually go grey from stress? Is it true that brushing it 100 times a day will make it shinier? But one of the most interesting (in our opinion) of them all is on the subject of self-cleaning.

We’ve all heard of Sally down the road who “didn’t wash her hair for two months’ straight, and now it cleans itself and she never has to bother with shampoo”. It sounds ridiculous, but also feasible: we never had shampoo and conditioner back in the caveman days, and we got by alright then, didn’t we? Surely if we just went back to our natural non-washing, chemical-free ways, we’d actually be better off for it?

Sadly, that would be wrong. While we can certainly cay our caveman ancestors didn’t care half as much about appearance as we do today, evidence suggests that they did still carry out basic hygiene practices, including washing their hair. We can’t be exactly sure what they used, but many historians believe they would have bathed in salt water lakes or the sea, which kills bacteria, or used clay to treat the hair with minerals and stimulate growth (not that they probably knew this at the time).

So yes, it was never really the “natural” way for hair to never be washed at all – but is Sally from down the road right in believing that her hair self-cleans itself eventually if she doesn’t wash it?

The answer is a complicated mix of yes or no. Let’s consider shampoo for a second, first of all. It’s no secret that most shampoos contain a combination of harsh chemicals that strip your hair of its natural oils. This is a good thing, in a sense, because it’s your hair’s natural oils that give it a greasy appearance once they’ve built up over time. But many people make a mistake of shampooing too frequently, which means the shampoo is stripping your hair of these oils far too regularly, causing your hair to panic-produce as much oil as quickly as possible to replace those that have been lost.

The best solution to this is to space out shampooing gradually, so that eventually, hair doesn’t produce oils as quickly, and subsequently can go for longer periods of time without being washed. With this in mind, many people think that you can eventually train your hair to only need to be washed once a week, then once a month, and finally, never at all.

The problem with this is that hair doesn’t “self-clean” in a conventional sense; just produces oils over a slower period of time. You’re still going to end up with greasy hair eventually, because there’s no getting around the natural oil-producing process, and actually, you wouldn’t want to. Our hair’s natural oils help combat dry scalp and dandruff, as well as nourish and protect the hair, enabling it to grow quickly and healthily.

If you want a real-life story of someone who tried to encourage their hair to go self-cleaning after giving up shampoo for six months, you can check out this popular blog post by Captain of the Backseat. The post’s author, Penny, went away on a cycling trip and decided to leave her usual shampoos and conditioners behind, in the hopes that her hair would eventually lose its greasiness, as the myth tells.

Unfortunately for Penny, things didn’t work out quite as she’d hoped. She writes that within five weeks, her hair “felt lank and was damp to the touch”, and only brushing it with a comb and rinsing it twice a day seemed to help it somewhat. Over the next few months, she describes her hair as going “from almost clean to greasy again”, but made no real progress in terms of fully self-cleaning itself. She soon realised she was encouraging an impossible process and washed her hair for the first time in six months, which felt “amazing” (we’re not surprised).

As for whether we’d attempt the self-cleaning hair challenge, we would respond with a definite “no”. No matter what you read on the internet, it just doesn’t work. While there’s no reason to be using shampoos and conditioners every night, we need them to keep our hair clean and shiny, if not anything else. Give your hair the self-love and respect it deserves and don’t believe the hype!