"Black Hair Care"

Caller (Tanya in Cleveland):
It is possible and healthy to wash your hair daily...
We got into a cultural habit, of not shampooing...
​Every time, you get your hair shampooed, you're cleaning off that hair shaft. You're closing up the hair shaft and it causes the hair to lay smoother. It causes it to shine. So, actually, the cleaner your hair is, the better it looks. The trick is to make sure that you're using the right products. 

Karen:​​ What kind of shampoo should we be using? What should we be using everyday?

Tanya: Mild moisturizing shampoo. Now, we have a lot of sulfate-free shampoos, so they're not as harsh on the hair. And then the more often that you shampoo it, the less shampoo you need. 

If you're going 2 weeks or longer, you need a whole lot of shampoo because you got a lot of dirt, grime, and oil on the hair that's clogging the hair making the hair shaft heavy and just a lot of guck on it. You're also smothering the pores on your scalp. 

Think about it like this, how would you look, if you didn't wash your face everyday. All of those skin cells and stuff, would start clogging up. You would have all kinds of issues. Well, hair is an appendage of the skin that's made of keratin protein but under that hair, you have your scalp. Your scalp needs to be clean and healthy and dirt-free. So, to shampoo everyday is fine. It's just a matter of making sure that you shampoo, condition, so then, you can start replenishing some of those oils at the conditioning phase and detangling the hair. And then put some oil back into it (jojoba oil, shea butters, olive oil). Something light.

Lamont: Now that we're stuck inside, are there somethings that we can make ourselves?

Tanya: You can take your coconut oils, or jojoba oils and add essential oils to them to make them smell really nice, whether you have natural hair or not. The most important thing is to make sure that your hair is clean. Because if your putting a bunch of oils on top of dirty hair, that's not good either. 

Karen: What about people with locs, braids, and synthetic hair? How do they wash their hair?

Tanya: As long as the hair is human, you can put a stocking cap on it and shampoo it and kind of squeeze the braids out as your shampooing them. With synthetic hair, you have to be careful. You can still clean your scalp. There are soapless shampoos that you can use. Add skin & scalp antiseptic on a cloth and just put a little bit on and go through the scalp. Use can use Listerine and go through the scalp. You can still have your hair and your scalp clean.