a hairy situation

Since I'm sitting here "cooking" my hair (activating some LUSH henna), I thought I would update on the hair situation. I still prefer no-poo to anything else I've done with my hair in the past couple of decades, so yay! But I do have to say that I am less than happy about my latest experiment, which was to wash it with honey only. Now, I will preface this by saying that I don't use "raw" materials to wash/rinse my hair. The whole point for me, along with more healthy hair/scalp, is to save money and time, and running around looking for, and paying for, raw/organic materials, i.e. NOT something I can just easily grab in the supermarket, violates that idea. I was never hugely into specialty products in the first place, perhaps because I'm allergic to so much anyway, so I'm not going to start now. So I just use "regular" honey and ACV, and frankly, I don't think that should be a problem.

All this is to say, I don't think I'm allergic to "additives" in the honey, but I found that after using honey only, my scalp reacted negatively, by flaking up quite a lot. So this week, I've eschewed honey entirely, using only BS/ACV, and it seems a little better, but it's probably going to take a while. Like I said, I sincerely doubt that it's "additives" that were the issue; my feeling, based on experience and seeing other people post about honey being drying sometimes, is that it's just not something that's right for me. Pity, because I love how my hair itself felt. But it's not like my hair hates baking soda (as long as I only use it once a week), so I'll be sticking with that for now. Once my scalp calms down - probably in the next couple of weeks - I'll go back to putting a squirt of honey in my ACV.

Today is henna day. I sometimes consider, instead of using henna in my hair (which is a pain in the ass and which I need to use shampoo to wash out, since I use stuff that's mixed with hard-to-get-out ingredients), just letting my hair go gray and then dyeing it with (say) subtle pastel colors. I'd probably have to cut it a bit short (temporarily) to do that, because my hair, rather than being the bright red of pure henna, also has a lot of indigo in it and so is very dark in some parts. I did, back in 2009, go completely gray for a while, but I ended up going back to coloring my hair because I was tired of people treating me as if I was in my 60s, when at the time, I was only in my 40s. It's a little different now that I actually have an AARP card and therefore am eligible for "senior" discounts in some places. But that said, I don't think I like how I look with gray hair. It's not like the hot young thangs these days who dye their hair silver. Hell...even when I was a young thang, I don't think I looked good with the (natural) gray hair I've had since (literally) my 20s.

And the henna DOES look good. It's not like using most commercial dyes that leave your hair all one color uniformly so that it's obvious you've dyed your hair. It's sort of reminiscent of when I used to get my hair done with highlights, back in the days when I lived in LA and had a hairdresser friend who would do it for only the cost of the dyes. And when it's growing out, there isn't an obvious line of demarcation like there tends to be with most commercial dyes - again, it does it in streaks, so that it's not as obvious that I color my hair (until I recolor it, that is, and the gray all goes away for a while). Soooo I'm really ambivalent about the whole thing. Continuing to use the henna goes against my whole "convenience and low expense" deal I've got going on by going no-poo, but at the same time, I don't know if I'm ready to try again to take the plunge back into gray.

And actually, as I said, even if I did stop using the henna, I'd probably do SOMETHING to tint my hair anyway. So really, it's not about going gray...it's about ceasing to use something that requires me to shampoo my hair every once in a while, and that is messy, inconvenient, and expensive. And aside from the "expensive", I am not sure that I really have too many options.