Eco friendly shampoo?

11 Responses to Eco friendly shampoo?

1. nyjlm | May 20, 2008 at 10:51 am |

   Lately I’ve been using shampoo/conditioner from Desert Essence.
   I’ve always been curi­ous about bar sham­poos, but con­cern over stor­age in the shower has kept me from try­ing them.

2. MamaBird/SurelyYouNest | May 20, 2008 at 10:52 am |

   For me the con­di­tioner is the crit­i­cal ele­ment in avoid­ing scalp itch­i­ness, so I am going to give you kind of a cir­cuitous answer. We get the whole foods house brand of sham­poo (pretty cheap + has no parabens or sodium lau­reth sul­fate) and then EO Hair Repair, Wild Lime & Gin­ger con­di­tioner. It’s eco friendly in that the ingre­di­ents are ok with the Skin Deep data­base but it is pack­aged in 4 oz plas­tic bot­tles and is cor­re­spond­ingly ridicu­lously expen­sive. But it works well for my DH who has the dri­est hair on the planet and makes my scalp feel lovely. Things I want to try but haven’t yet: sham­poo *bars* to skip the plas­tic pack­ag­ing alto­gether (ie lush, burt’s bees), and/or using just bak­ing soda for sham­poo + vine­gar for con­di­tioner. HTH

3. CTJen | May 20, 2008 at 11:50 am |

   Herbal tea +vine­gar rinses. Check out this blog post from the Herb Wife’s Kitchen:

   http://crabappleherbs.com/blog/2008/02/01/simple-herbal-hair-care/

   I am in the process of switch­ing from the Chaz Dean (http://www.chazdeanstore.com/) prod­ucts to the Herb Wife’s method.

   The days when I use the herbal rinse instead of the cleans­ing con­di­tioner, I feel lit­tle or no dif­fer­ence in the level of hair clean­li­ness. I mean, we aren’t exactly work­ing out in the fields all day, every day. Why on earth does our hair need to be washed with chem­i­cals every day?

   The herbal rins­ing method is extremely eco friendly–in addi­tion to elim­i­nat­ing chem­i­cal waste in our water, it elim­i­nates pack­ag­ing waste in our landfills.

   Cheers!

4. amy | May 20, 2008 at 12:43 pm |

   I use dr bron­ners for every­thing

5. Sara | May 20, 2008 at 2:42 pm |

   Gio­vanni.

   I won’t link to the web­site because I find it use­less, just a bunch of tire­some mar­ket­ing hype on an irri­tat­ing Flash base, but you can find this stuff at Whole Foods, any nat­ural foods store, and more and more con­ven­tional stores all the time. It has no sodium lau­rel or lau­reth sul­fate or other harsh, car­cino­genic sur­fac­tants, so it won’t cause con­tact der­mati­tis. It does not con­tain urea or alco­hol, not any kind of alco­hol. It’s made mostly of puri­fied water and all-organic plant extracts. It’s not stinky; the scent of the one I use is fresh and light like spearmint and comes from the ingre­di­ents them­selves, not come from added scent agents such as essen­tial oils to which many peo­ple are sen­si­tive in both skin and nose. It’s about eight bucks a bot­tle, but a bot­tle lasts me about three months. (I only use about a quarter-teaspoon at a time of the sham­poo, and only use the con­di­tioner once or twice a week.)

   I like the “golden wheat” sham­poo and the “weight­less for­mula” con­di­tioner. My true love, who has thick, curly, long hair (unlike my nasty, thin, long hair) uses the same prod­ucts with equal sat­is­fac­tion. You’re sup­posed to be able to use this con­di­tioner as a “leave-in” prod­uct, but I don’t; my true love does, though. I work it into my hair and scalp, let it sit for a few min­utes while I wash the rest of myself, and then rinse it out thor­oughly. The sham­poo washes com­pletely out. The con­di­tioner washes com­pletely out. Nei­ther dries or inflames my insanely sen­si­tive skin or gunks up my hair and scalp — or my true loves. Nei­ther causes either of us to have dry, split, or frizzy hair.

   This stuff saved my hair, actu­ally. When I worked at Whole Foods and rec­om­mended it to equally des­per­ate cus­tomers, they all reported back to me with sim­i­lar suc­cess and grat­i­tude. It’s the best sham­poo I’ve ever used, bar none, with the best ingre­di­ents for both you and the planet that I’ve seen yet.

   Desert Essence con­tains tea tree oil which is an irri­tant for sen­si­tive skin. (It lit­er­ally burns my flesh. My true love uses it in the wash cycle with extremely hot water when clean­ing the bed­sheets in order to kill dust mites. It’s not gen­tle stuff, though it is a pow­er­ful astrin­gent and dis­in­fec­tant.) EO tends to favor extremely strong essen­tial oils which can irri­tate both sen­si­tive skin and sen­si­tive noses. Bak­ing soda and vine­gar can fry sen­si­tive skin, espe­cially with pro­longed use.

   I love Giovanni.

6. savia | May 20, 2008 at 5:33 pm |

   There’s a brand called “Live Clean” that’s paraben-free and envi­ron­men­tally friendly. I’m pretty sure they have an anti-dandruff for­mula. A friend of mine has tried a num­ber of organic sham­poos and found that many left her hair look­ing dull and fly­away. She swears by this brand and says it makes her hair look great. And it’s pretty cheap, too — about $7 (CDN) a bottle.

7. Al | May 20, 2008 at 7:27 pm |

   I’ve used sham­poo bars in the past but was not so much a fan of the one I tried (but it was from an old class­mate who made the stuff at home). It dried my hair out.

   I go back and forth on this one. I spend a shit ton of money on AVEDA because they have a very good envi­ron­men­tal ethic but the sham­poo I cur­rently have is not all organic. Just mostly.

   Good luck and if I think of any­thing else, I’ll re-chime…

8. Cheri @ Blog This Mom! | May 20, 2008 at 7:45 pm |

   Just stopped by for the com­ments, ’cause I have NO idea either.

   Signed,
   Snow Head

9. Mary Ann | May 20, 2008 at 10:06 pm |

   vodka

10. backlist | May 21, 2008 at 10:53 am |

    I love love love beauty with­out creulty (BWC)
    http://www.beautywithoutcruelty.com/

    I get it from drugstore.com or from whole foods. It doesn’t have the sul­fates that make me itch and the rose­mary mint has tea tree which should help with dan­druff. It smells nice, but sub­tle and is cru­elty free.

11. Angelina | May 22, 2008 at 8:33 am |

    I’m tak­ing notes too because I’m very dis­turbed by the amount of nasty chem­i­cals in the only sham­poo that has ever tamed my flakes (I was told by a der­ma­tol­o­gist that I didn’t have dan­druff but one of those other issues I can never spell that Sel­sun Blue helps with). Any­way, I am on a quest to find a great sham­poo (or a cou­ple to alter­nate) that is safe enough to go into my gar­den if I can ever get a grey water sys­tem fig­ured out.

    In any case, I would also like to not be con­t­a­m­i­nat­ing all of our com­mu­nal water­ways either.

    Vodka? Really?