- 1/4 cup oatmeal
- 1 tsp crushed lavender or other fragrant herb
- 1 tsp baking soda
Sprinkle enough of the mixture to cover all hair, and massage for five minutes before it it brushed out
***
Since I am going No 'Poo for an upcoming post here, I thought that I would look around for a good "dry shampoo" recipe. The adjustment period for going without shampoo is leaving my hair a disgusting, greasy mess, so a dry shampoo should be just what the doctor ordered, right? Wrong. I found my recipe for a dry shampoo here and, since I like DIY Instructables so much, I thought I'd give it a shot. I wish I hadn't.
The ingredients themselves are easy to find in your kitchen or garden (I used dried rose petals instead of lavender), but that's where the fun ends, folks. I used a mortar and pestle to grind everything together and wondered what the point of the lavender (or rose, in my case) was since all I could smell was oatmeal. Into a jar it went and then I just waited for my hair to get greasy. It didn't take long.
I sprinkled it into my hair (and all over the sink and floor) and tried to massage for five minutes. I didn't even make it two. Because of the bits of oatmeal, it honestly felt like there were large bugs in my hair. It was pretty unsettling. In addition to the bug feeling, bits of this mess fell inside my shirt and, eventually, down onto the floor to join the rest of the mess that this made. After making my head hurt with chunks of dry oatmeal, I finally just decided to brush it out.
Or... try to brush it out. It took several minutes to brush even enough of it out to be confident that I'd removed all of the oatmeal bits and then my hair still looked like I'd poured white powder on it. I kept brushing and brushing to no avail. Even though most of the mix was out, there were white specs all over my hair that were very reminiscent of nits except that they weren't actually lice eggs. I don't know about the rest of you, but I have no interest in going out with my head looking like it's full of lice eggs. I eventually just got my brush wet with some water and kept brushing my hair until it was damp. While this got rid of a lot of the tiny white bits, it made my hair look even greasier.
All in all, it was not a great experience and I got to spend the next several minutes cleaning my bathroom sink, counter and floor. I did wonder briefly if I hadn't ground the oatmeal well enough, but with this amount of ingredients, it would have taken all day to grind it as finely as the baking soda.
No, thanks, I'll just go back to my old standby, baby powder (you can also use cornstarch). Sprinkle it in your hair before bed (or in the morning) and it'll soak the grease right up. Of course, this may give you static, but so does that dry shampoo.
I give this mess 1 out of 5 washes.
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