I don't use shampoo
I do not regularly use shampoo. I have not been for about 5 years now. 7? Idr. I like how my hair looks and feels better without it. I shower once every 4-6 days usually. I scrub my scalp, I rinse, and I 'wash' the natural oils out of my hair, but a lot of my natural oils remain, when compared to how stripped my hair looks and feels after shampoo (even if I use conditioner).
My original motivation was to reduce waste, and this still largely drives this choice today. I do use shampoo for specific purposes - wash out dirty lakewater or pool chemicals.
I am critical of assumptions that we "need" shampoo, conditioner, or other hair products. You may have specific hair-related goals that call for these products, and that's fine. But I do not equate these goals with "needs". I also think that a water-only hair-care routine is more effective at managing hair health than most people realize.
I recently accused myself of being "weird" for not using hair-products, then considered that most of human-history was without shampoo, so perhaps it is the modern hair-car routines that are "weird". Apparently shampooing regularly has only been commonplace since the early-to-mid 1900s.
I think however you choose to care for your hair is fine, but I do think its cool to reduce waste, I do like to justify my lifestyle choices when they go against norms, and I don't like when people are misinformed.
From Time's history of shampoo:
the ability to lather up at home became a thing in the 1800s, but people were still using the stuff very sparingly. We’re talking washing your hair only once a month sparingly. [opinion redacted]
The New York Times announced in a 1908 article that it was fine to wash your hair every couple weeks [snark redacted]. Then, in the late 1920s, liquid shampoo was [bias redacted] invented, making it far simpler to wash [hair].
Dermatologists and beauty experts alike advise against daily shampooing, saying it’s best to only lather up a couple times a week at most — and the NoPoo anti-shampoo movement has caught on with certain people — but I still say few things feel better and make me feel more confident than shiny clean hair.
I do strongly disagree with the notion that "clean" only happens with shampoo. And in my personal experience, my hair got less greasy after I kicked regular shampoo-use.
I believe many of these products create a dependence. Strip the oils, so your body makes more, so you need to strip them more often. This has been my personal experience. Results may vary. I do not have a strong scientific backing for my point of view, so take it lightly.
When I quit using shampoo, it took about 2-4 weeks for my body's over-production of oil to chill out, then things started to normalize.
Soap history
It looks like soap was originally invented about 4,500 years ago for mostly industrial purposes, and perhaps used for cleaning skin 3,500 years ago, but I didn't see any clear indication this use was widespread. I didn't look very hard.
In the mid-to-late 1800s, along with the advent of modern advertising, came an ad campaign "Good morning! Have you used Pears’ soap?" that "changed the way people saw personal hygiene. Many people began, for the first time, washing themselves every morning."
According to Wikipedia, "Public health measures and advances in medical science contributed to a sharp increase in global life expectancy from about 31 years in 1900 to over 66 years in 2000."
From minimal reading, it sounds like soap usage has contributed to extended life expectancies, but it is just one part of multiple causes of improved life expectancy:
However, from the mid-1800s onward, estimated life expectancy at birth doubled every 10 generations due to improved health care, sanitation, immunizations, access to clean water, and better nutrition.
i do frequently wash my hands by the way. I've also talked to my doc about my lack-of-shampoo and she says its fine.
This is low quality "research", which is good enough for me for now.
I've also learned (from Industrial Revolutions Pod) about improvements to modern city infrastructure that played a major role in increase life expectancy - better management of waste and of water.
also
Scientists note that the main factors limiting life expectancy were infant deaths and early deaths caused by malnutrition or disease. This included pandemics like the bubonic plague of the 14th century that spread throughout Europe and Asia, killing more than a third of Europe’s population.
Similar losses were attributed to smallpox, which resulted in pandemics during the 11th century (attributed to the Crusades) and the 17th century (due to the immigration of European settlers into North America).
Widespread poverty also led to malnutrition and early death in ancient times in the same way as it does today.
Looking stuff up online
this does not suffice as proper research or study, but I don't care.
The first documented use of soap is described on a cuneiform tablet found in Girsu. According to chemical archaeologist Martin Levy, the tablet was written 4,500 years ago and concerns the washing and dyeing of wool. To properly dye wool, a weaver must remove the lanolin fats from the textiles, which is accomplished far more easily with soap. Even today, weavers wash freshly sheared wool in soapy water to remove the lanolin.
Alkalis are found in the ashes of burned wood and many scholars believe early humans used wet ash to clean greasy butchering tools. Unbeknownst to the cleaner, ash combined with the animal grease to create a simple, impure soap.
Yet there’s reason to believe no one discovered one could make soap itself—which one could then wash one’s hands with—before 5,000 years ago, according to Rasmussen. Because there’s no mention of soap for the first millennia of Mesopotamian writing, most scholars believe soap was discovered in some proximity to its first mention in the tablets 4,500 years ago. “If it was known long before Sumerian times we would expect to see references to it in earlier Sumerian records, which we don’t,” Rasmussen tells me.
Sumerians almost certainly didn’t wash their hands with soap for the same reason modern doctors often fail to—because their hands already look clean. For hundreds of years after its invention there’s no evidence anyone used soap to clean their bodies. Instead it was used on items like dishes or clothing that had obvious grease stains. The first proof that anyone used soap to clean their skin comes from a cuneiform tablet found in the Hittite capital of Boghazkoi and written nearly a thousand years after Nini.
Human history is the record of humankind from prehistory to the present. Modern humans evolved in Africa around 300,000 years ago and initially lived as hunter-gatherers. They migrated out of Africa during the Last Ice Age and had populated most of the Earth by the end of the Ice Age 12,000 years ago. Soon afterward, the Neolithic Revolution in West Asia brought the first systematic husbandry of plants and animals, and saw many humans transition from a nomadic life to a sedentary existence as farmers in permanent settlements. The growing complexity of human societies necessitated systems of accounting and writing.
These developments paved the way for the emergence of early civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, and China, marking the beginning of the Ancient period in 3500 BCE.
Public health measures and advances in medical science contributed to a sharp increase in global life expectancy from about 31 years in 1900 to over 66 years in 2000.
As early as the 1500s, people in India used the pulp of a fruit called soapberries combined with some herbs and even hibiscus flowers to keep their hair on point. When British colonial traders were going back and forth between India and England, they knew a good thing when they saw it and brought the notion of shampooing your hair to Europe. Yes, it’s true, prior to that, strands in the Western world were left to their own — probably quite dirty — devices.
the ability to lather up at home became a thing in the 1800s, but people were still using the stuff very sparingly. We’re talking washing your hair only once a month sparingly. These were grim times.
The New York Times announced in a 1908 article that it was fine to wash your hair every couple weeks (one would hope). Then, in the late 1920s, liquid shampoo was finally invented, making it far simpler to wash that man right out of your hair.
Dermatologists and beauty experts alike advise against daily shampooing, saying it’s best to only lather up a couple times a week at most — and the NoPoo anti-shampoo movement has caught on with certain people — but I still say few things feel better and make me feel more confident than shiny clean hair.
Average Life Expectancy | Verywell health
Scientists note that the main factors limiting life expectancy were infant deaths and early deaths caused by malnutrition or disease. This included pandemics like the bubonic plague of the 14th century that spread throughout Europe and Asia, killing more than a third of Europe’s population.
Similar losses were attributed to smallpox, which resulted in pandemics during the 11th century (attributed to the Crusades) and the 17th century (due to the immigration of European settlers into North America).
Widespread poverty also led to malnutrition and early death in ancient times in the same way as it does today.
However, from the mid-1800s onward, estimated life expectancy at birth doubled every 10 generations due to improved health care, sanitation, immunizations, access to clean water, and better nutrition.6
Even so, diseases like rheumatic fever, typhoid, and scarlet fever still impacted life expectancy during the 1800s and early 1900s. But as science progressed and newly created vaccines offered protection against many of these and other illnesses, life expectancy began to rapidly increase.
Life expectancy has improved considerably since the 1800s, largely due to improvements in infant mortality and public health measures such as vaccines.
In 1900, life expectancy was only around 47 years. Today, the average life expectancy for someone living in the United States is around 78 years. This is a vast improvement over the average life expectancy for someone living in prehistoric times, which was only around 30.