Go With Natural Care for Hair…Get Out of the Shampoo Isles Forever

Consumer “experts” periodically wander the aisles in major retail outlets, checking ingredients lists on the most popular products, assessing both their safety and their long-term benefits for users.  As the experts shop on your behalf, their studies confirm exactly what you always suspected: The shampoo aisle does not quite drive the “Incredible” Needle into the red-zone, but it does push it well into the yellow.  Even if you use so-called “natural” or “organic” shampoo, conditioner, and styling products, you still are loading-up your otherwise luxurious locks with all kinds of waxes, silicones, alcohol, FD&C red and yellow dyes, and earth-hostile preservatives.  You also are wasting a lot of your hard-earned paycheck on products you can make better and cheaper for yourself.  Abandon the shampoo and haircare aisle once and for all, and go with genuinely natural care for hair for maximum satisfaction.

Natural Care for a Woman’s Hair

Women’s hair, their crowning glory, naturally needs regular cleansing, but a good regime of natural care for hair also will stress nourishing, revitalizing, and conditioning.  The more you use styling appliances, especially curling and crimping irons, and the more you use mousse or gel, the more you need deep-cleansing citrus-enriched shampoo.  But, providing the very best natural care for your hair, you especially need essential-oil rich rinse and conditioner.  Mix your own everyday conditioner and include jojoba oil, aloe vera, tea tree, rosemary, and lavender, all of which preserve the natural balance of oils in your hair, nourish it and promote its growth, and help keep your scalp clean, conditioned, and healthy.  Also, take advantage of a natural haircare aromatherapy trick: to maintain your own mood and keep yourself amazingly alluring, put a couple drops of lavender or rosemary of your brush and vigorously brush your hair before you gently shampoo it in the morning.  All day long, your hair will diffuse rich rosemary or lavender fragrance every time you move your head or bob your ponytail.

Natural Care for a Man’s Hair

Give-up those manly-man products that make your hair look thicker by filling follicles with silicone and wax.  Put down the big pharmaceutical, chemically formulated “minoxidil” that continues working only as long as you keep paying for and using it.  Go with all-natural hair care to make your hair grow fuller, thicker, and far more attractive without rendering your scalp a toxic waste dump.  Mix your own shampoo and conditioners, using pure soap products and adding rich woodsy and spicy essential oils—cedar, for example, or juniper made provocative with apple and clove.  If you use gel, prepare your own with Jojoba carrier oil: add basil, burdock, and rosemary to promote natural regrowth of the hair you have lost, and sweeten your mix with the same essential plant extracts you added to your organic shampoo. 

Natural Care for Children’s Hair

The majority of commercial baby shampoos have all the best natural ingredients and no harmful chemicals or additives, so that you may use them with confidence, sparing yourself the extra time and energy required to formulate your own.  Many mothers continue using baby shampoo on their children’s hair all the way through pre-school, and many moms extol the special virtues of new baby shampoos enriched with essential oils to help babies and young children relax and fall asleep after tubtime.

As children get older and busier, however, they need more advanced natural care for hair.  They work and play harder than their younger siblings, so that their hair and scalps collect dirt, sand, playground bark, dried perspiration, and traces of just about everybody and everything they have touched and used all day long.  Therefore, good, deep cleansing becomes the first priority in natural care for kids’ hair. Translation: lots of lemon or other citrus.  More important than cleansing kids’ hair, however, cleansing their scalps becomes essential.  Find or blend shampoos enriched with sage, tea tree, chamomile, and rosemary; all the mints help cleanse and maintain kid’s scalps, too—and what kid does not love peppermint or spearmint?  And remember that you can find recipes for making all your kids’ natural hair products smell exactly like bubble gum.