Episode 33
Transcript
Welcome back to the Fully Nourished podcast, a place to explore where female physiology and feminine energy dance together to shape our life experience. I'm your host, Jessica Ash, functional nutritionist and integrative health coach and I'm inviting you to journey with me through both the scientific and spiritual facets of what it looks like to awaken our feminine radiance and become deeply and fully nourished despite living in a society that is increasingly desperate to erase our female set-apartness. You ready?
As a reminder, everything in this podcast is for education and inspiration only and is not intended as medical advice. Please talk to the appropriate professional when necessary. And please use common sense before making any changes to your diet and lifestyle.
So in today's episode, we're going to talk about hair. And I don't just want to talk about hair growth and strategies for hair loss and reasons behind that. So dig a little bit deeper into just how much hair can be an extension of ourselves, and also maybe add to the conversation about natural hair care. I know if you listened to last week's episode with Arielle Martinez, we touched on natural hair care and sovereign beauty. But I also want to acknowledge that there's two sides to that story, and there is room for nuance when it comes to hair care, and I will share my own kind of unique hair journey.
My Hair Journey
Over the course of the past decade, I have been experimenting with natural products, really figuring out my own hair for more than a decade now, amongst experiencing a lot of hair loss. I've been very transparent about how, for me, one of my main symptoms that drove me to take care of my health amongst really bad gut issues, autoimmune symptoms, PCOS, was the hair loss component of it, and I lost a lot of hair along the way when I was going low carb and intermittent fasting, trying to obviously fix my hormones and fix the root of it, but not recognizing how much stress I was causing to my body. I've learned a lot along the way, and I've made a lot of mistakes along the way that I hope I can save you from.
I feel like it's the nature of the beast right now, the way that we share information, especially through social media. A lot of information gets so generalized like it applies to every single person across the planet. And if it doesn't apply to you, then there's something wrong with you. I think a lot of women are often taking in information about how to care for themselves or to support themselves. And if it doesn't work for them, or they found a different way, instead of being confident that they know their own body and being confident that they have found out something or they are confident in their own experience, they start to think that there's something wrong with them and they internalize like maybe I should be doing something different. Of course, there's a time and a place where self-reflection and changing our ways is really beneficial and amazing for us. But I think a lot of times it can actually do harm as well.
So I think most of us know that the health of our hair and the appearance of our hair and how our hair interacts with its environment is really very much influenced by our internal health. We need the right nutrients to grow hair. We need protein and digestion of protein. So not just eating the protein, but actually being able to digest it. We need enough carbohydrates for thyroid conversion and the liver, and we need to have good gut health because our hair follicles are very sensitive to inflammation and endotoxin production. Of course, our hormones impact our hair from our sex hormones to pituitary hormones like prolactin to thyroid hormones and adrenal hormones, as our hair is very sensitive to elevated levels of adrenaline and cortisol because at the end of the day, hair is a luxury, it's not something that is a necessity for survival. And so if you are spending so much of your time in a survival state where your body is trying to cut as many corners as possible to conserve resources or shunt resources over to the survival organs, which often happens when we're in these heightened states of fight or flight or have dropped into those states of freeze.
Either way, when we're in heightened states, I call them “power states” where we're trying to survive, our body is really shunting blood flow away from the rest and digest organs like the digestive system and the extremities. So that would include the scalp, the fingers and toes. That's why we often get very cold when we're in a low energy state or we have a poor metabolism, and that blood is being directed more towards our lungs and our muscle tissue and our heart, the things that we would need when we are trying to survive. And then a lot of times, if people remain in a fight or flight state for too long, they eventually end up in a collapsed state, sometimes called fawn or freeze state eventually, where the body has now shifted to conserve resources because it's still trying to survive, but it can no longer stay in those heightened states of survival only when absolutely necessary, and then it remains frozen otherwise. And so none of these states are really very strong metabolic states.
They're all low energy states, in a way, because regardless of the shift in hormones in fight or flight, you're going to have a much different hormonal response than in freeze. You're still going to be utilizing resources in a way that is just focusing on surviving in the here and now, and not regenerating or renewing or digesting metabolizing those are things that are on the back burner as we survive. And the hair follicles. Now, I have this whole hair loss series that I recorded a few years ago, still available on YouTube, and I dive way more into the breakdown of actually the structure of the hair and the certain nutrients we need for hair health and how to support that. Not going to dive too far into that today. That kind of deserves its own episode. But what I think is also important to talk about in regards to hair health, and it's something that I've experienced and I've also seen happen again and again with women that I've talked to, women that I've worked with is when a woman is experiencing hair loss, it starts to shift us energetically. And I think there's a few reasons behind this.
The Energetics of Hair
Energetically, we see that our hair is really associated with our power and our control. And so in energy circles, when people are losing their hair, it's often referred to as fear or tension or trying to control everything, not trusting the process of life. And so starting to lose our hair or starting to see more hair loss starts to feed into this conflict, and it remains a conflict until we can resolve it. And then it starts to feed on itself. Even in German New Medicine you see how they refer to hair loss as usually a conflict of separation. And if you stay in the conflict phase, it just continues to feed on itself. I think often the pattern is, and this goes for more than just hair care, this goes for caring for our bodies as a whole. We often see that instead of giving ourselves the kindness and the compassion and the love and the energy and the attention that we need, like when our body is crying for rest, for example, or we're really burned out. We see this in burnout. We try to double down and start to just seek and search ways to fix ourselves. We almost try to throw the kitchen sink at things where it's like, you're scrambling.
To me, it's this last phase of collapse where you're just like trying to grasp at whatever you can to just try to save yourself instead of just acknowledging that my body is wise and I'm tired because I'm tired. I'm not tired because I need an adaptogen. I'm tired because I need to rest. It's the same thing where I think a lot for a lot of us, when we start to experience hair loss or we start to see changes in our hair, we start to do whatever we can to throw the kitchen sink at it. Or and we sometimes do both. We feel ashamed. And so we start to hide it. We start to just neglect it. We start to throw it up in a bun. We start to just not care for it, not wash it as much, just let it get dirty, just not want to touch it or give any attention to it. And I think that in part also continues this conflict where instead of giving it compassion and kindness and like really focusing our attention and care on it, and in such a careful and loving way, we starve our hair of our attention and our love. And to me, hair is love.
Even throughout history, you can see how hair is associated with things like love and beauty or even like power. I think of the story of Samson mostly because I have a long haired German Shepherd named Samson, and he does have just this most luscious, beautiful, shiny, long, all black coat. And he absolutely knows it. He absolutely owns that power. And he reminds me to do that every day. But I also think of hair as love, just in the way of there's nothing more attentive and nurturing than having somebody else wash and brush and just braid your hair in a leisurely way. And I think we often deny ourselves of that. And I see this as a much bigger problem than just that we have a lack of self-care. It's a societal, generational problem, to not know how to take care of your hair, and to not have that built into your routine as a young girl.
I look at traditional cultures, and I always think of how in traditional cultures that weren't the melting pot that we now live in, most places, it's the mesh mix up of a bunch of different genealogies and genetics, which leads to all of us having very different hair before. Most women in a community would probably have a very similar type of hair, and their hair needs were probably very similar as well. And so this led to them having these kinds of traditions surrounding hair care. You look at, for example, like Eastern Asian hair care with the use of something like high protein rice water or fermented rice water, which would make sense for very thick and high porosity hair that needs a lot of protein. But that wouldn't make sense for somebody that needs very little protein on their hair or has very low porosity hair. Or we look at Indian culture that's very into kind of heavily oiling the hair. And again, these kinds of thicker, denser oils work really well for certain hair types. But hair care has always been tailored to the environment and tailored to the hair type, and obviously tailored to what is available to these women, the herbs that are around them, the provisions that are around them, and always more focused and tailored to the actual health of the hair, the aesthetic or the appearance of the hair fruited from the health of the hair.
And now, like many things in our culture, it's all about the aesthetic of the hair. And we don't really have a lot of these traditions, right? Like our exposure to hair care as children watching our mothers. Unless our mother was very unique, or we grew up with women who were in on the secret, a lot of us thought that hair care was just like shampoo, condition, and blow dry, and there was never oiling or using herbs or trimming ends, or just putting any time or attention and brushing very softly and very attentively. No preparation for bed, just like allowing her hair to just be up in a bun, just down. And so I think it's led to a lot of us just thinking that we're very much a slave to our genetics, which, sure, genetics always have an impact, but do we have any other control besides just our diet and nutrition and our genetics? Yeah, I think it's a possibility for sure. But there has been this loss of an emotional connection to our hair other than just frustration or fear or neglect. And we see this almost thread of just loss of dominion over our own bodies or sovereignty in really just owning what we have and taking care of it to the absolute best of our abilities, and learning it instead of wishing it was something else, or dressing for the body that we wanted, instead of the body that we have, or taking care of the hair for the hair that we want that we're never going to have.
Why don't we actually make the most of what is available to us and really revel in our own uniqueness and our own beauty? And so I know it can be really frustrating because we cannot choose the hair we're born with. We can only do the best we can with what we have. And I also think it's really frustrating to, especially in the health and wellness space where people who have like, really good hair are always using it as a tool to sell where you're like, you had really good hair to begin with, even when you were unhealthy. Your hair was really good. So it can be really frustrating when you see someone who's, yeah, my hair was crap and you're like looking at it and you're like, that's actually like my hair on its best day. So thank you. And seriously, like, we can all admit that there's nothing more skeezy than that. It's the same thing with people who are, I don't know, like naturally lean, for example. And then it takes them a lot to build muscle, but once they build muscle, they remain really lean and really toned or muscular because you can see their muscle. And then you look at someone that's maybe five foot and tends to store a lot more fat on their body. They aren't ever going to look like that. It's just a completely different body type. Both beautiful, both unique.
But it's like comparing an apple to an orange. They're just two different things. And so it really does grind my gears when influencers, especially even like specifically in this kind of pro metabolic crowd, this metabolic circle jerk or crunchy mama circle jerk, which they overlap. It's like, eat like me, do what I do and you'll be as beautiful and aesthetic as I am. You'll have perfect skin, perfect hair, perfect life, perfect kids, perfect husband. And you'll be hot. Use my coupon code, you peasant. It's like the same thing as do what I do. Live as non-toxic as I do. And you will never stink. Your BO will never stink. You'll barely ever have to wash your hair. You have no toxins coming out of your skin. You will poop only purity and perfection.
Don't get me wrong, it's absolutely entertaining to watch, but at the same time, it really does make me very infuriated because there are many women that fall for it, and many women that get caught up in the fantasy, right? What these women are portraying is not reality. Of course we know that, I think, I hope, but unfortunately I think a lot of women do get it confused with reality. And so they have those expectations on themselves, and they feel like if they're eating this way, they're nourishing their bodies, they're doing all the things right, quote unquote, doing all the things. And they're not getting those results. There's something wrong with them. Oh my gosh, I ate something yesterday that maybe wasn't the best. And like, my pit stinks. Oh no. Like, maybe there's something wrong with me. There's something wrong with my armpit microbiome. Oh my gosh, your body's removing something. Those are removal pathways. I hope that your body is removing things.
And so bringing it back to hair. I think we see this in the crunchy world, where we can tend to get obsessed with everything being natural and non-toxic, and I have even gotten caught up in this in the past. I now feel like I've gone through both extremes of the pendulum, that I've been able to find my balance with what works and doesn't work, and I think a lot of us are driven by almost like a trauma of our own burnout. Or I always say, like a lot of people get traumatized by their own burnout and then they have a hard time overcoming that. They're like living their life to try to avoid becoming burned out again. And I feel like it's the same thing with whatever happens with our health. I think a lot of us start a journey to become a little bit more aware of what's in our products and more aware of what our body's exposed to because we do experience real, true health issues.
A lot of us are led into this place because our quality of life has gone downhill. There's symptoms that are affecting our everyday life. But unfortunately, what happens in this crunchy world or this health and wellness world is there becomes this moving goalpost. Instead of focusing on becoming more resilient and focusing on removing the things that are true barriers to our body to find the healing that they need, people bring their unhealthy nervous system patterns and their unhealthy behaviors and thought patterns and their fight or flight dogmatic response into their health journey with them and start to only focus on the physical, material things that are outside of themselves that they can control. And they forget that there's a whole internal world that's also driving a lot of these imbalances. And so when they get started on this crunchy journey or this health and wellness journey, the idea of I'm going to be a little bit more conscious about what my body is exposed to, I'm going to become a little bit more conscious of what I eat. I'm going to start to really focus on what makes me feel good. It starts to become this series of moving goal posts where who can become more and more extreme and dogmatic, and it almost becomes a competition. And I think it's a competition amongst females, to be honest, I really do.
There's so much masculine energy within the health and wellness space and dominating energy and dogmatic energy. It's a game of power and control with a lot of these influencers. I think a lot of them have, I'm not like an armchair diagnosis saying like, all these ladies are narcissists. But I do think even in my experience and as part of what kind of drove me insane about being on Instagram specifically was you have to have a certain level of almost narcissism to enjoy the guru worship. To me, it always made me extremely uncomfortable and anxious. The level of influence and the ability to just be able to like, say you do something not because you even thoughtfully did it. It's just what you do because you're just like a normal human being and have so much influence over somebody else's life. It's like it felt like so much responsibility, like I was breaking under the weight of it. And so I think that's why I didn't really thrive. Like I couldn't sustain it for very long. But the women that I interacted with, I think I was shocked by their and I didn't want to say unethical behaviors. It was just like this complete lack of self-reflection. They enjoy the power. They enjoy the domination. They enjoy the fact that women are constantly asking them like, what brand of toilet paper they wipe their butt with. It's okay, I'm going to do a countdown for 48 hours, and in 48 hours I'm going to drop the most important information ever. What square of toilet paper I wipe my butt with? Drumroll, please. And newsflash I don't use toilet paper because it's too toxic. So you can either use a $3,000 bidet. I have a coupon code for 10% off if you want it, or you can just let it sit there and nourish your butt microbiome. I do both occasionally.
Moving Goalposts of Health
But jokes aside, going back to the goal post, it's like these hoops are just going to keep getting higher and higher. The goal posts are just going to keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And to me, it's really more of a symptom of how out of control women feel and how much they have no trust in anything but themselves. At the end of the day, there's a big lack of trust. What are you so afraid of? And I think for a lot of us, like I mentioned before, we're so afraid of experiencing where we got before, and we think that if we just white knuckle grip our way through life, that it's going to prevent us from going back to that place again. And it's really, I think, on a deeper level, that lack of self trust, but also a lack of trust in our higher power. If we have a relationship with our higher power, we have a connection to the divine. Why are we so tight knuckled? Why are we trying to control every outcome? We really only hurt ourselves.
And this is where I think the extremism within the wellness community or the crunchy community ends up sometimes hurting us rather than helping us. And this is something that I had to learn on my own. I think we all go through this. There's a special cycle that we go through right when we first learn about this stuff, it's, oh my gosh, everything that I thought was good for me is no longer good for me. Ah, it feels like your whole life is crumbling. Your whole world is crashing down. You're having to relearn almost how to live life in a way, what products do I use? What things do I eat? And at the beginning it can feel like a lot. But to me, the sign of getting healthier and the sign of actually getting more resilient over time is just that you should become a little bit more resilient. You should become stronger, more flexible, and this should reflect in both your physical body and your emotional and spiritual self as well. That's a sign of expansion. That's a sign of growth. If you're not expanding and you're contracting, your world is getting smaller and smaller and smaller. Your bubble is getting smaller and smaller. That's usually a sign that we're not headed in the right direction. We're headed in the wrong direction, and eventually that bubble becomes so small, that box becomes so small that we cannot breathe, it becomes a straitjacket, and we almost become martyrs in a lot of ways.
The Straight-Jacket of Natural Hair Care
I experienced this personally with trying to be so committed to only natural hair care. I know you thought how is she going to bring this back to hair care? And do you know what I promised you? I was going to bring it back to hair care, and I did. But this is really something that I specifically experienced with hair care about a decade ago or so. That's when I really started to, like, think about cleaning up my personal care products. I feel like it's definitely a journey. Anyone that expects themselves to do this, like all at once, is definitely expecting too much of themselves. And it was difficult a decade ago when there was like nothing on the market, like non-toxic hair care was really unheard of. There was really only like what you could buy at the health food store, which wasn't really that natural or non-toxic. And then there was like stuff you made at home. It was like the era of Wellness Mama, where it is like making shampoo out of Castile soap. And I remember trying to make so much of my own products back then. And like everything, you buy all these ingredients and you're like, okay, I'm going to make this stuff. It's going to be so natural, so wonderful.
And then you would use it. I remember one time I washed my hair with Castile soap, coconut milk concoction. And if you've ever washed your hair with Castile soap, it like leaves this disgusting lard-ass film on your hair. And I remember, like, getting out of the shower and I was like, my hair feels like a block of lard. I don't even think I'm going to be able to brush this, like, ever. So I was like, okay, that's not going to happen. Really. The only thing that I could find ten years ago was Shea Moisture. And Shea Moisture was not, like completely amazing, natural, non-toxic, but it actually worked like it was something that was actually decent. And their products have now changed. They've definitely been sold and they've changed ingredients, which makes me really sad because their products actually used to be really good for my specific hair, but I moved on from that.
I experimented and dabbled with certain things over the years, so there was a period of time where I tried to do like the whole Morocco method, only clay-based shampoos and conditioners. That didn't work well, although I did and I still do use their products for scalp cleansing and scalp health. Like especially love love the Morocco Method Apple Cider Vinegar shampoo. I use it almost as a scalp mask. I guess you could say you can also use rhassoul clay, which I really love using as well. I love using clay masks on my scalp. I feel like they really regulate sebum production, at least for me. I tend to have a really oily scalp and then dry in the winter like both dry and oily. So for me, they've always helped regulate things and I use each interchangeably. But I do feel like the Morocco method one is a little bit more hydrating than just using like, straight rhassoul clay mixed with water. So that's something that I discovered along the way that I still love and really enjoy.
The other thing that I discovered along the way is when I experimented with the no poo method for a while there. Oh, what a disaster, right? Like using no poo. I think I was only able to belt it out for a month and a half, and anytime that somebody tells you that, like your hair is just detoxing and you just feel like in your heart and your soul and your gut like something is wrong, this is not right. This does not feel right. Please trust yourself. And that goes for just about anything in the world. That goes for skin, that goes for your body. If something doesn't feel right and it doesn't feel like you're, I don't know, concluding a cycle, you're like, okay, like I'm almost to the finish line. There's obviously something wrong, right? And my experiment with no poo was not it.
Then I think I dabbled for a while just like various I don't know, that was when I was on a budget. I was like Acure, like just the cheapest kind of “natural shampoos” that I could find. That was when a little bit more variety was coming onto the market. Just random stuff, I don't know, just stuff that you'd buy at the health food store, which, well, none of that stuff really worked very well. And then I remember discovering Under Luna, which was like it started to become heavily promoted pretty quickly by influencers. And this was just a few years back, and I really wanted to love it, but I feel like it like actually destroyed my curl pattern, really made my hair, like, just blow open and become very frizzy. So I quickly glossed over that. I wanted to love it. I wanted to fit in with circlejerk, but I couldn't.
And then that's when I was turned on to these lard based shampoo bars that yeah, that was not a fun time either. And I again, it was like, you're going to go through a detox and all this stuff. I gave it like a good like 6 to 8 weeks. And I was like, oh my gosh, I need to wash my hair with some shit. Oh dear God, I just want any shampoo at this point.
I'll take some Suave please. And then I moved on to Innersense. And Innersense was something that I used when they first came out. And I remember being like, oh my gosh, finally, like a natural ish hair care product that finally is not just all natural, just trying to be so natural. It's actually formulated for function. And I'll be honest, I have pretty resilient hair. And throughout this process, I just didn't pay too much attention to it all that much. I was like, my hair is clean, my hair is forming waves, curls like, it's good, it feels good. Whatever. At some point during my Innersense use, and I should have listened to it earlier and no shade on the brand at all. Like I loved it when I was using it, but I think I used it for maybe just about two years, and towards the end of that time it was more like I just couldn't have a good hair day every time I used it, every time I washed my hair, every time I did my routine, it was like sometimes I would have a good hair day and then most of the time I would not. And I kept living for chasing that good hair day that I thought I could have, but I rarely ever had. And then, for the first time in my life, I started to experience what people call breakage, which I had not really ever experienced, like frizz from breakage or breakage before in my life. And I was just like, wait, what? I'm using like a pretty expensive hair care brand. I don't know what else I could use at this point. I'm pretty much tried every single brand on the market, and I've also dabbled in natural hair care as well, and I've picked up some stuff along the way. But a lot of the stuff's not working for my hair type. Is there something wrong with my hair? Do I just have really unique hair?
So as I self reflected on a few things I had changed over the years, I started to really do research and just really start to dive into understanding my own hair type, because at this point I did not know where to go from there, and I felt like everything that I was doing was making things worse, and I was not going to let anyone convince me that I was crazy. And I feel like in the, you know, health and wellness space, the nutrition space, the metabolic space, the first thing that makes sense to go to is like nutrition hormones, right? But I was pretty on top of that. And so I was thinking like, there's not really much else I can do to “fix” what's going on. It has to be environmental. It has to be something that's going on my hair, touching my hair and just like I mentioned earlier, I think what oftentimes begins to happen is I don't even want to touch it. Like I just want to, like, make sure it's okay and just treat it like it's fine china, because I don't want anything else. I don't want to ruin anything else.
And in some regards, like until you learn what's going on, that might be a good approach. But I was just trying to be as gentle as possible with my hair so that I didn't cause any more damage. A few things that I wish I would have known very early on in picking hair care, because I probably would have been a little more careful about just jumping on a bandwagon because it's natural and because it's quote unquote non-toxic or whatever the words we're using about it. And after learning what I've learned, I've realized that even if you're crunchy, you don't have to be crusty. And I think a lot of women, we've become martyrs to our own crunchiness. Like, we think that if it's not natural, like I'm just going to forego and I'm going to look like a grease ball, or I'm going to literally look like I have the greasiest most nastiest hair possible, just in the name of what? Health, scalp microbiome, whatever it might be. But I think for a lot of us, the crustiness actually can take a toll on our mental health.
Crunchy, Not Crusty
I remember I got one DM from a lovely woman who was like, my dirty little secret is that I love to use Tide on my sheets. And so once in a while I'll just use Tide on my sheets and just smell that clean, fresh smell of Tide. And just like, what has this world come to that our dirty little secret is like washing our sheets with Tide. So I think, too, there's a lot of things that I realize now was I was just being crusty for the sake of being crunchy. And I just, I think I've woken up and been like, wow, that is actually a really crusty behavior. The first one for me is like going super long periods without washing your hair. Everybody has different hair, different needs. But I know for me personally, like I used to wash my hair pretty often as a young girl and that was when I obviously we have the best hair when we're like teenagers and we're using like Tresemme, but there's so many women who have told me and they'll say, it's crazy, but I had the best hair ever when I was using like Herbal Essences or I was using Tresemme, or I was using Pantene, and now I spend all this money on my haircare and I feel like my hair is worse than ever. And I've always had those, like, kind of little whispers, those little messages in the back of my mind. They're what drive me when you guys share that stuff with me. Like it fuels me because it's not like I'm not going to gaslight you and be like, I think it's just something wrong with you. Like it's a you problem. You're doing the routine wrong, or you're doing the protocol wrong or whatever it might be. And it was sure that's the case.
But this extends beyond hair, right? We experienced this all the time where it's like it's a you problem. You're doing the protocol wrong. You're doing the thing wrong. You're doing the this wrong. And I think in some regards, sometimes if it feels like we're having to force something. Or something doesn't feel right, we can take a step back and ask, is this the right step for me? If I listen to that and I'm thinking in my head, yeah, to be honest, me too. Like, I used to swim in chlorinated pools, almost like every day when I was growing up. And I had the best hair ever. And I was using Herbal Essences. So it's like when you guys say that stuff to me, like, like plant seeds. And I'm like, I wonder why that is. And so for me, I was a frequent washer. I used the cheapest shampoo and conditioner possible, as most of us did, and my hair was awesome. Now, of course there's nuance to it as there is to most things, but in recent years, all you hear is wash your hair only when necessary. Try to go as much time between washings as possible. Washing your hair damages your hair. People back then never washed their hair. They wash their hair like once a month. So you should wash your hair once a month or whatever the stories might be. But I find that I do need a little bit more frequent washing because my hair stays more hydrated.
And this is where I do get a little bit annoyed with just the very generalized advice out there all the time about every little thing, because everybody is in a different environment, a different humidity environment, a different water environment. So some of us are washing our hair in water that is extremely hard, right? Some of us are washing our hair in water that's extremely soft. If we have a water softener, if we're exchanging the calcium and magnesium ions for sodium, of course our hair is going to react differently to that water. So just the water alone, it's like people used to wash their hair in spring water, like in a river. Now we're like channeling our water that has all these chemicals in it through these wack ass pipes. If you've ever seen what's in water pipes, it's disgusting. And we have all this stuff that is being recycled through our environment is within the water on top of it.
Some of us live in cities where there's like tons of environmental pollutants, and then some of us actually have hormonal imbalances that we're struggling with, or our body is actively removing waste from our body. Let's say we've really started working on our metabolism. And so our body is now feeling safe enough to remove that stuff from the deep tissue. Like we can have stuff coming out of our scalp that we don't want sitting on our scalp for a month. That is a horrible idea. And so this idea that your sebum is healthy and it moisturizes your scalp, well, yes, of course that's true. However, what's in the sebum matters. And if you have oil that has DHT or certain hormones like estrogen or even toxins like endotoxin just sitting there, the hair follicles are very sensitive. They're like almost like these little mini organelles that are high energy producers. They need a certain environment and they need a lot of blood flow, and they need to be clean, like they can't be completely clogged and flooded with a bunch of junk just sitting on your scalp. So I went from being a frequent washer to trying to, quote unquote, train my scalp for many years, and I am now able to go many days without washing, like I could go a week or two without washing. However, I think that's gross. Like, I don't like it. I think it's nasty. I think it smells. I don't care if people say they don't smell. I'm like, you don't smell your own smell. I think it smells and I feel disgusting. It's so gross. And if you have to constantly use dry shampoo, like you're just putting the powder in your hair or I don't know, I don't really use spray on dry shampoos because the butane really freaks me out. But even that, it just feels so gross. Like, I do not understand how people just live for weeks at a time with dry shampoo. If that's you, that's amazing. Like you are a true MVP, but I cannot disconnect from my nasty, dirty scalp.
I also was always really confused at how people kept their hair so hydrated when they were going so long without washing, because my hair always gets very dry at the end and people would be like, just brush your scalp oils through your hair. But it's I have curly wavy hair. The minute I start to brush my hair, it just becomes a poof ball and it doesn't go back until it gets wet again. So I started to just try to wet my hair in between do co-washes and that works to an extent, but my hair is very fine and so it can get really tangled. And I need a really strong conditioning agent and none of the natural conditioning agents that do the trick. It's just not. It's not it. That's a long way of saying that. I just was like, is there something wrong with my hair? There's something wrong with my process. What am I doing wrong?
But when I started to actually learn about the types of hair and I'm not talking like I have wavy hair, curly hair, straight hair, but actually like low porosity or high porosity, things really began to make sense for me, and I think every single woman should know her hair porosity and her type. So if you're low porosity, medium porosity, high porosity, or if you have very fine strands, medium strands or very coarse and thick strands, because I think a lot of people think that their hair type like they're like, I have curly hair, so therefore I have this type of hair, but that's not always the case. And what I came to find out was that I have very low porosity hair, and I've always had low porosity hair, which explains so much about my hair. So if you don't know what porosities are pretty much like a quick overview, you can probably find a lot about it on the internet. That's how I found out about it. But pretty much when you have low porosity hair, it just means that it's not very porous. So the cuticles, if you've ever looked at a hair strand and you look at the cuticles, they're either open or closed and that's how they bleach hair. They open up the cuticles and pull pigment from the cuticles, and then they try to smooth the cuticle back down. And so people that have high porosity, it's highly porous. So those cuticles are more open and it's more likely to accept things into it. Whereas like lower porosity hair, those cuticles are very tightly bound, shut or closed. And it's very hard to get things into it. Now there's pros and cons to both. It's not good or bad to have any type, it's just what your type is. And because I have such low porosity hair, I started to realize that some of the more popular trends for hair care are really damaging my hair. So because I have such low porosity hair, my hair does not take in like really heavy butters and really heavy oils like coconut oil, castor oil, even shea butter like those heavier oils don't do anything to my hair. They don't soak in. They actually just sit on the outside and they can cause a lot of breakage for me. They also make my hair feel extremely dry. And I was always like, what's wrong with me?
People always talk about oiling their hair and how it like, makes their hair so thick and so hydrated. And every time I wash my or every time I oil my hair, it just is feeling a little bit drier than normal. And although it's shiny and it's manageable, like, it also feels really dry. That's because for me and my hair type, when you put oil on the hair, it prevents hydration from getting in. And so oil doesn't hydrate, right? It nourishes. Water is what hydrates right liquid things that are water based. And so when you put oil on low porosity hair, that oil just sits on the outside, especially those heavier oils, and prevents water from getting into the hair. And it can actually cause dryness. And so what I started to realize as I quickly recognized like, wow, I have low porosity hair, most natural products, the “natural products” out there have these really heavy oils. Coconut oil is very popularly used in the hair care industry, and both the quote unquote non-toxic industry or like greenwash industry. And then the more just like conventional hair care industry, like coconut oil is a pretty widely used product. So is like castor oil and shea butters. And I now realize that those were just sitting on my hair, probably causing more breakage and not actually allowing my hair to hydrate and to get the proper nourishment it needs.
Also, low porosity hair is usually not as hydrated, but it has a lot of protein. And so something that's really interesting to me is that most hair products, both on the natural end of the spectrum and I say natural like very lightly because a lot of brands are greenwashed, but it is, let's say, more mindful of the ingredients they put in. They tend to have a lot of these like plant proteins in them now, which I don't really remember being such a big thing until the past, I don't know, five years ish, but it's every single hair care product you're gonna find like hydrolyzed quinoa, protein, collagen protein. A lot of times these like vegan proteins, but there's also collagen and all of these proteins. And they say that they're too big to get into the cuticle and so they shouldn't cause over keratinization and they shouldn't cause breakage. But that was not in my experience. And so I think that's why I had such a bad experience with Innersense and maybe at first it was like the perfect balance of hydration and protein. But then over time, I was getting way too much protein in my hair. And it was actually, it causes your hair to just become brittle and break.
This was also expounded upon by the fact that when we moved out of the house and we are in the RV now, our water situation changed. Like I couldn't have a whole water, a whole house water filter on the RV in the same way that I did. And so it changed the type of water. Plus, we're living in a different location all the time, and so the hardness of the water changes from location to location. A way that I've gotten around this is by using distilled water to wash my hair, or at least taking like a gallon of distilled water and soaking my hair in that first thing. So that's the first thing that I like. It soaks into my hair, so I'm not having this really hard water soak into my hair first, because again, those hard minerals are actually getting lodged into my cuticles and causing breakage. And since low porosity hair is so sensitive to proteins and minerals, and I particularly have very fine hair, like I've always had fine hair, but a lot of it. So my strands themselves are very fine. They are even more prone to breakage. And so I'm only sharing this not because I don't really have anything of what to do about it, but more just I'm sure there are other women listening who have experienced the frustration with trying natural products. You spend a lot of money on these products because you do want to support brands that care about their ingredients, but then you are using them and they're making your hair feel worse and you're like, what is going on?
Hair Care Terminology to Know
Know your hair type, know your hair porosity. You'll be able to quickly pinpoint like, oh, I am using protein products or bonding products, these popular bonding products out there that are for “damaged” hair. If you have low porosity hair that already has too much protein, you're usually making breakage worse. And that's very popular right now in the haircare, quote unquote TikTok world. It's really important to know your hair type.
Another thing that I learned along the way was that the popular terms right now, especially in the more like non-toxic or more green hair care industry is like, you'll hear sulfate free, you'll hear silicone free. Those are the two main ones. There's other things like phthalates and other additives. But one thing that has been happening right under our noses is that when a brand says sulfate free and this could be a more conventional brand or a more natural brand, they can. Sometimes sulfates are cleansers. So we're not going to talk about if they're good or bad, because most of the stuff is not probably the greatest for us, but more of their function, right? These are cleansers.
And so I think a lot of women who say that I feel like my hair does so much better on “conventional” hair care. There's a couple of reasons why this is probably the case. The first one is that if you're using a shampoo that has sulfates in it, you're getting a really good cleanse. So we're not talking about if that's a good or bad thing, we're not going into the microbiome or anything like that. But at the end of the day, if you have junk in your pores that's sitting on your scalp for months on end or days on end, if you have not been using a shampoo or a cleansing method that's actually cleansing your scalp, think about that. If you don't have a clean scalp, how is your hair going to grow? When we wash our hair, we “shampoo” ourselves. It's really not for the hair. The hair itself is not very dirty. It's the scalp that's the problem. It's the scalp that's emanating things, right? And there are people right now that I think are probably under cleansing and not realizing it. They're not getting off of the scalp what they need to get off of the scalp. And you don't need to use sulfates to get a good cleanse, but sulfates do cleanse the scalp. And so you can take that as a clue of when I use sulfate based shampoos, my hair grew better. My hair felt healthier. My scalp felt healthier. It's not necessarily that it was the conventional shampoo, it was the fact that you were getting a really effective cleanse of your scalp.
And a lot of these brands, what they do to be able to say that they're sulfate free because that's the hot language, is they will actually input different cleansers, right? They aren't going to use sulfates, but they'll use some type of derivative or something else that's called something different. And so what they're able to do is say sulfate free. But these cleansers might not actually be as effective, and they might actually be more harsh on the hair itself. And that can obviously cause damage. Right? So two things – you're not getting the scalp cleanse that you want, and now you're causing more damage to the actual strand of the hair.
The other big big term is silicone free, which I think a lot of us, we don't want to really be exposed to silicones. I think a lot of us are starting to realize, okay, these silicones, these plastics, these forever chemicals. Of course they're scary. Of course they're disturbing to have in our environment and disturbing to have on our bodies. We don't want to be storing these up forever. But what silicones do in haircare is an important thing to recognize is they coat the strand of hair. Now you'll hear certain people be like these things, put a layer of crap on your hair and it's not your real hair, and you need to detox from these things and remove these things from your hair. And that's why your hair is going to look so bad when you first start using natural hair care. Part of that's true, right? If you're taking these silicones, this coating of your hair is going to probably look a little less thick. Your hair is going to operate a little bit different, and it's going to have a lot less slip to it.
It's also on the con side, going to be much more likely to be a victim of friction. This is where it's important to recognize if you were somebody that was able to have your hair down all the time, rubbing up against the back of your seat, rubbing against things with no problems, when you were using silicone based conditioners, you were coating your hair and now you're not coating your hair. That could be why you're experiencing a lot of hair damage and breakage. I think some people that think that they're experiencing hair loss, of course, there are people that are experiencing real true scalp hair loss, but I think a lot of people that are experiencing hair thinning, especially towards the ends of their hair, it's actually breakage that they're not recognizing is breakage because they're either coating their strands with stuff that's preventing hydration, preventing the proper nourishment, or they no longer have any type of barrier between the friction of just their daily activity. And so let's be honest with each other and say that there is some type of balance in between.
For a lot of us, I think a lot of women would appreciate, especially women that are really struggling with their hair. Let's say you are having unexplained hair loss or you just got diagnosed with PCOS. You don't have a lot of time under your belt to get to the root causes, or you have hypothyroidism or some type of autoimmune disease that is driving hair loss. And the reason I mention those things is because they're so near and dear to me. There are things that I have experienced in my life, and it feels like you're losing control, right? And you want to just do anything and everything to protect your hair. I think it's important to be honest that jumping over to natural hair care, while for some women, can be life changing and they have amazing hair from it, which I love to see, that might not be the result for everybody. And if your hair is very prone to damage because of what's going on with your hormones in the here and now, or what's going on with your health or you have a lot of stress and so your hair is becoming a different texture. It's becoming a little bit more brittle or a little bit more sensitive. It is an important point to bring up that although healing your metabolism and nourishing your body and focusing on getting better digestion so you can digest the nutrients in your food better and fixing and correcting nutrient deficiencies and imbalances, all of that is going to have a positive benefit on our hair, getting our stress levels down and supporting our thyroid function, balancing our estrogen to progesterone ratio, replenishing things like zinc, balancing our circadian rhythms so our pituitary is not pumping out tons of prolactin.
All of these things are going to have beneficial effects on our hair, but it's going to take time, and it takes a lot of time for that to show up in the hair. Usually it's one of the last things to heal along with the skin. And so it is important to recognize that if you are experiencing hair that's very sensitive right now to its environment, you do need to protect it. What that looks like for you in regards to hair care, that's your choice. And if you feel like finding something in between, I think protecting your hair is really important. What I have learned personally is that I cannot tolerate a protein in products. I need hydration and I need to cleanse my scalp. Cleansing my scalp has made such a huge difference so quickly. Avoiding protein products has made a huge difference super quickly. Also, for me adding a leave-in conditioner, I had a very difficult time finding a leave in conditioner that didn't have protein in it, so I just scoured and found one that worked for me. I ended up using Curlsmith Weightless Air Dry Cream. It's nothing super amazing, but it is protein free and it hydrates without having leaving like a heavy film on my hair. And then I'm able to follow that up with a nice flaxseed gel, which is something that I learned from Arielle de Martinez. And I do feel like that holds a lot of hydration in for me, the most important thing for my hair is holding in hydration and locking in hydration.
I do oil my scalp and spray rosemary like I make a rosemary infusion with water that I spray on my scalp pretty much every morning and every night. And then I oil my scalp with lightweight oils usually a couple hours before I end up washing my hair. I don't sleep with oil on my hair. I've learned my lesson that it can cause breakage, and I'll nourish the ends of my hair with a little bit of oil. But my ends have to be damp first so everyone that can oil their hair dry, that's great. But for low porosity hair, that tends to work a little bit less well. But it's a good idea to oil the ends of your hair before you actually wash your hair or shampoo your hair, because it does protect the ends from damage.
And so those are the tips that have helped me the most, along with just keeping my hair in a braid, a loose braid most of the time instead of always keeping my hair down. I used to sleep with my hair down and live with my hair down, and now I'm a little bit more cautious about that. I sleep with a silk bonnet and a silk pillowcase and keep my hair in a braid when I'm sleeping, or when I'm just lounging around. Those things have made the hugest difference for me. We can do a whole nother episode on hair growth tips and the things that work really well, and the things that don't work really well. It does a lot of times come down to our hormones and nutrients, but things like red light therapy and scalp massages really do make a big difference for hair health. And of course, just getting out in the sun and getting enough sun on our hair.
But overall, I just wanted to talk about the things that we don't often talk about in regards to hair. I know for me personally, just like taking that time and carving out that time to very gently brush my hair and very gently braid my hair and massage my scalp and spray my rosemary spray on my scalp, and then the day I'm going to wash my hair, oiling my my scalp and oiling my ends and doing a hair mask, all of those things have really added to my… I don't know…there's an energy and an attention that goes into doing that for your hair that's really special, and you can use that time instead of being like, oh my gosh, my hair is breaking or my hair is this or my hair is that. It's like speaking life into your hair and yourself just saying, oh my gosh, I love taking care of my hair. I think a lot of times right now, a lot of us are spending a lot of time on technology. We're spending a lot of time on our phones, we're spending a lot of time scrolling. And can we direct some of that time that we're using for that into ourselves to just bring some energy and attention to the areas that have been so long neglected?
And can we stop using the excuse of crunchy to become crusty, like it feels good to have clean hair. It feels good to have hair that's taken care of and not filled with the past two weeks’ oil, and it's just slicks down to our head and start taking care of ourselves. In that way, we don't have to be a martyr to our crunchiness, and we can find balance and nuance that works for us. And I hope that this can extend way beyond just our hair care. I hope that this can extend into the health and wellness space altogether.
Taking dominion, true dominion, I think a lot of people will say they're taking personal responsibility and sovereignty over their own body and their own homes. But actually what's happening is we're living in fear. We're living in fear of our pasts. We're living in fear of products. We're wasting energy on being afraid of every little thing in our lives, avoiding every little thing in our lives, dodging landmines in every little area of our lives instead of really becoming more resilient and really growing into whatever that needs to mean for us and our life's journey. And we're letting our purpose to become like, who can be the most crunchy? Who can be the most pure? Who can be the most ___? And it has drained us of our joy, of our pleasure, of our life. And I'm hoping that as we as women shift, because I can already see the shift taking place in this new direction. Like we can breathe life back into this community, but also back into the world, like life and grace and joy and fun and play and leave all this extremism and dogmatic thinking behind.
Episode Links
In this episode, I mentioned:
Curlsmith Weightless Air Dry Cream: https://amzn.to/3K36WsL
Flaxseed Gel Recipe: https://thecoconutmama.com/flaxseed-gel-for-hair/
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