The Vicious Cycle of Product Use

I was talking to my friend this weekend about an article on NPR I forwarded to her and a few other friends, about shampoo and how women used to only shampoo their hair once a month.  That's right, once a month.  This is the article here:  http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102062969.

It's an interesting article that explains the role of ad marketing in convincing women that they needed to wash their hair once a week, then eventually once a day.  And women bought it, and men too, and they bought the products, which is why shampoos are big business now.

The point of the article and the title of it as well, was that Less is More.  That in reality, the more you use shampoo, the more you need it, because the chemicals in it strip your hair of sebum (which your hair needs to stay healthy), and causes it to dry out, which then causes it to get really greasy.  Just like washing your face too much can cause your oil glands to act up to overcompensate for the loss of oil, washing your hair too much has the same effect.

Thus, it becomes a vicious cycle where your hair gets oily and you wash it with shampoo, which seems to clean it, but essentially makes it more oily.  Now you're hooked on this product which you think you need to maintain your normal state of cleanliness, when it's the reason that's causing your hair to get greasier in the first place!  It's a sad sad cycle too that's hard to get out of unless you realize that it's the product that's causing your greasiness and not just your natural oil production.

I guess it's a hard thing for Americans to realize, what with our addictions to coffee and anti-bacterial soap, but using products doesn't always make your life easier, and using more products don't always make things better.  They might actually make things worst.  That's hard to swallow for a generation that grew up on the idea that hair washing every day was necessary for good hygiene.  But in actuality of fact, as the article also states, if you wash your hair less, it produces less oil and you won't have to wash it as much.  The only caveat here, however, is that you need to switch whatever shampoo you're using to one that doesn't have the chemical sodium lauryl/laureth sulfate, which is the chemical that strips your hair of sebum.  If you continue to use the same shampoo that causes your oily hair, you won't be able to get out of the cycle.

The funny thing is, even with all the evidence that is presented to people, they still continue to do what the shampoo companies want them to do:  wash their hair every day, and blame their own genetics for their excessive oil production.  I guess it's hard when you've gotten into the habit of doing things a certain way, to change that habit.  No matter what you hear, you want to keep doing things the way you've always done them.  That's why the shampoo companies are doing very well today.