On Being Kind to Yourself

I’m not kind to myself.  At all.  My inner dialogue is too scary for me to publicly talk about, so I’ll just leave it as I’m utterly atrocious to myself.

That being said, it might be surprising that I’m trying to change how I treat myself.  I’m trying to spoil my body, my skin, and my hair with things that are good.  I’m trying to move toward more of a vegetable friendly diet (and Weight Watchers, by the way), drink more water, and rid my beauty products of as much of the bad stuff as I can, which includes silicons, their derivatives and cousins, as well as sulfates.

-Cone products and sulfates are especially bad for people with sensitive skin, acne prone skin, and people with dry hair (i.e. African Americans and those with curly or chemically processed hair).  What do these things do to ya, you ask?

Well… sulfates are basically in all shampoos, conditioners, and styling products unless you buy specialty brand or search high and low.  They make all these products lather and strip away all the body’s natural oils along with the grime of the day.  Sulfates are also in laundry detergents and dish soaps.  So, you might as well be washing your hair in dish soap.  I don’t know about anybody else, but dish soap makes my hands incredibly dry to the point of cracking and bleeding if I do dishes by hand a lot.  Thankfully I have a dishwasher now, so I don’t get that as often.  But seriously.  Dish soap.  On your precious hair.  On your face!  Yikes.

That’s not the worst part though.

Most styling products, especially ones labeled to reduce frizz, have silicone in them.  A lot of silicons are not water soluble.  Simply put, they don’t come out of your hair with gentle friction or any other product that doesn’t have a surfactant… usually a sulfate.  Every single hair product I was using had silicone (and sulfates) in it.  From my shampoo, to my conditioner, to the styling cream I was using… they all had silicone!  My hair kept getting frizzier, flatter, and my scalp started itching more.  Despite my careful washing, styling, drying, my hair was getting frizzier, drier, and falling out, PLUS losing its curl.  I very, very rarely use heat via blow dryer or flat iron to style my hair, so I knew that wasn’t a factor in the demise of my hair.

I got the worst haircut I’ve had in a while last week and had an allergic reaction to some products that were used on my hair.  My hair was razored to oblivion and looks thin and stringy now when curly.   I feel like I have a mullet, but Brett insists that I don’t.  Needless to say, I’m not going back to this stylist.  But when my whole body was itching, I started researching ingredients in hair products and came across naturallycurly.com where I found a regimen that would work for me and my hair.

My hair had had enough abuse.  So I decided I was going to no-poo it (i.e. use no shampoo), but upon further research I learned that that wasn’t enough.   Not using shampoo would only worsen frizz and grease since nothing would be able to remove those damaging silicons.   Thus… the switch to sulfate and silicone free products.  You don’t have to spend a lot of money to buy these products.  Suave Naturals is a perfect starting point.  It’s cheap (cheaper than Pantene, Herbal Essences, etc).  You find it at a supermarket.  And it doesn’t have silicone or sulfate in any of the “Naturals” line.

I started out using this:

It’s not cheap.  It’s like $10 for a bottle.  And also, if you notice that paw right there on the bottle,  it’s a pet shampoo.  Yes.  I use a pet shampoo.  It’s all natural, makes my hair feel clean, and it is sulfate and silicone-free.  I use it once a week to really get my hair clean, but otherwise, I use Burt’s Bees Very Volumizing Pomegranate & Soy Conditioner to clean my hair with friction.  I found it at Target on sale, so score!  Then after washing my hair with conditioner, I gently scrunch the water out of my hair, mix some silicone-free gel and my conditioner together and scrunch it into my hair.  Then I scrunch the water out with my cheesecloth-like hair towel, wrap it up, and let it sit in the towel for about 30 minutes.  I let my hair air dry for anywhere from 1-3 hours.  It depends on how much I’ve scrunched the water out of my hair, really.  Then once it’s dry, I “scrunch the crunch,” which is a cutesy phrase for scrunching the crunchy feeling of the gel out of my hair.

It’s important to note that if anyone wants to switch to this method of caring for your hair, you MUST wash your hair one last time with the sulfate laden shampoo in order to strip out all the silicons and start from scratch.  Then you can shampoo, if you use shampoo, with the sulfate/silicone free shampoo, conditioner, and then style as usual.  Like I said, I never use heat on my hair, but be careful if you use heat and a product containing a  lot of natural oils.  You might scorch your hair.

My hair is still transitioning from sulfate and silicone products so it’s still greasy sooner than I would like (after two days) and falls flat and frizzes a little throughout the day.  Some say it can take as much as six weeks for your hair and scalp to adjust to the changes, especially if you shampoo, condition, style with heat every single day.  Even so, the curl pattern in my hair is returning.  I love it, minus the atrocious haircut that can truly only be fixed by chopping my hair off right at my chin.  My hair has grown almost six inches in the last year (seriously), so I’m not going to go that route.  I’ll just go in for routine trims off the bottom and only the bottom layer.

Ignore my ghastly expression in the crappy second picture.  I was showing my friend Bethanie my haircut (and being silly), which looks pretty good flat-ironed straight, no?  It’s a different story when it’s curly, which I won’t show you yet, haha.  I had about three inches cut off my hair, just as a reference point.

Anyway, I recently ordered a lot of Aubrey Organics conditioner, styling products, and face products because they’re raved about on naturallycurly.com (quite a wealth of information for curly-haired people) to replace my mish mash of random styling products.  I didn’t like the Nexxus gel that I picked up at Target because it makes my hair too oily and too crunchy after scrunching the crunch despite varying the quantity.  Too little and my hair frizzes, too much and it gets too oily.  It’s an experiment.

I will post pictures of my hair curly in time.  I love my curly hair so much more than my straight hair, so I really want this to work out.  I did this to be kind to my hair and skin… and hopefully that will translate into being kind to myself mentally and emotionally.