Maybe I Should Have Done This on St. Patrick's Day

Lately I've been trying home remedies for my hair. It's not happy. The super arid air here is making it very upset. And growing it out long is probably not helping.

Dear Locks of Love,

I'm not sure I can do this. I had great intentions
but I'm slowly losing my mind. Summer will be
here soon. I think I will send you my daughter's
hair instead. Another month or two and she should
be good to go.

Anyway, whether or not I do Locks of Love, I want to get my hair in better shape. First I've banned all shampoo containing sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS). It's drying and unnecessary. I did some internet searches and tried soaking my hair with warm olive oil, which was gross and just left my hair disgustingly oily (even after 3 shampoos), and mashed avocado which did make my hair feel great but it still looked like straw.

Anyway, I could go on and on, but you don't need to hear about it all. Tonight I decided to make my own shampoo. Lately I've been using liquid castille soap as my shampoo and it's been okay. I think I bought the wrong kind of castille soap, though, because it contains more coconut oil than olive oil, which is apparently not as good. But finding the pure olive oil kind is hard and would most likely involve ordering over the internet and paying shipping. Not gonna happen right now.

So, I found a recipe for homemade shampoo in the herb book Caralie's teacher recently gave me.

Ingredients:

• water
• liquid castille soap
• orange zest
• dried lavender flowers
• dried rosemary
• lavender essential oil
• rosemary essential oil
  

So first I cooked the orange zest and dried herbs in the water until it reduced:

Then strained the liquid into the castille soap and added the oils:

Then poured it into a reusable squeeze bottle:

And ended up with this lovely concoction:

It looks frightening.

It smells great.

I'm nervous.

So ... tonight I'm gonna use this stuff.

And tomorrow I may look like this:


Maybe I should find my hat.