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Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

You could always try not using shampoo. A shampoo is good occasionally, but you really don't need to strip your hair of oils every single day.

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Around the time when the marketing industry exploded in the 20th century, it became a hygienic necessity to strip the oils out of your hair and replace them with a synthetic alternative (conditioner). I haven't used shampoo for about 10 years now. For some reason many people are shocked by the notion of not using shampoo, but my hair looks good and I see no benefit to removing its natural oils.

might as well not use deodorant either, those bacteria under your arms are naturally occurring! wouldn't want to disrupt anything.

gotta love taking advice from ancient humans when determining how to be hygienic.

He's right though. You should try it. Depending on your haircut you can probably go much longer than a day without shampooing. That doesn't stop you from rinsing it, after all.

Length is big. I cut my hair on about a 6 month cycle. At the beginning I can go a week or more without shampoo, towards the end I look overly grimy after just a day or two without shampoo.

This is actually something I thought about recently, and I've slowly began to experiment with not using deodorant. But I'm way more wary of doing so because BO is way more off-putting than greasy hair.

At first, my pits did stink pretty bad. But they did seem to get less so after 3 days. The problem is that I can't tell if my olfactory sense has just adjusted to the stink. Then I recently had a party to go to, and I chickened out and put on deodorant.

By the way, I work from home so I wasn't driving any co-workers crazy with my BO. lol

I've been using deodorant every other day for the last week and that seems to work just fine.

I live in a hot climate. I've never used deodorant. A/C+I shower and swim a fair amount and that seems to be enough. I personally find the odor of perfumes 1000X more offensive than BO. I once had to leave the gym because of an older woman that was radiating her perfume in ~25M radius. And that shit was on her skin. My eyes were watering at the edge of her halo so I don't know how she could even breathe. If I didn't smell lilac in there I would have thought it was a chem attack.

> I've never used deodorant.

I suppose now you know how people feel around you.

It's very awkward to be around people who smell bad. Most people will just avoid the confrontation of pulling you aside and telling you that you reek.

I speak for a lot of people when I say that I prefer nauseating lilac over the smells that can swelter and fester in someone's pits.

Lol. I prefer to be clean than masked. Most workplaces here have shower stalls for people who need them. For example if you biked to work.

Someone tried this at my place of work and smelled horrible for a month straight. I would guess that most people are just not telling their co-workers they smell bad.

I did the "no-poo" (terrible marketing) thing some time back and swear by it, even if there is an icky adjustment period. I don't know how well this will work for deodorant. If this is something you want to undertake, I can suggest a couple of things:

First, shave off your underarm hair. I have a rather keen sense of smell, to the point where I can find my own scent off-putting by evening. Without long strands of fur to cling to, the bacteria will not do as well.

Second, experiment. You could try a left-right method, using one side of your body as control. You might also try putting some T-shirts in a plastic bag and getting someone else (someone you trust and would humor you with this endeavor) to try a whiff test to see what another vantage point has to offer.

However, shave away. Helps quite a lot.

There's theories out there that bacteria that oxidizes ammonia would have been pretty common. Before treated water and daily soaping.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/magazine/my-no-soap-no-sh...

What do you use to clean your hair? Do you just rinse it in water?

When I had hair, I just rinsed it under water. Water is already a pretty good sovent, but isn't nearly as aggressive as detergents in shampoo.

Nobody I knew realized that I didn't use shampoo. I told lots of people that I didn't use it and they were shocked that it was even possible. My hair was fine. They weren't just being nice. I also discovered that a few other people in my social circle also didn't use shampoo, including some women with longer hair. I'd have never guessed.

I normally rinse my hair and scalp thoroughly with just water, working my hands around the scalp once or twice. I have a friend who uses baking soda as a shampoo substitute, but I've never felt the need to try it.

The natural AND synthetic oils are disgusting to me.

Remove all oils and don't replace them.

Use a bar of surfactant bar soap everywhere.

Everything squeaks and is bone dry until nature's chaos reasserts itself.

Flesh is gross.

Robotic bodies when

It does seem like a radical option but is surprisingly doable. Beyond Soap was a book recommended here, which was a great read and discourages daily use of soap and shampoo (and conditioner if need be): https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Soap-Truth-Beautiful-Healthy/d...

Sound advice.

However, we don't need to use most of the products we use anyway, but we do, so we should try to make things have as little impact as possible.

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