[Image description: A digital drawing of Joki Bedrieger. It depicts him in his Joker form, head floating above his body. He’s smiling widely but he is also crying. One of his hands caresses the side of his face, while the other is resting in the crook of his arm. The latter is covered in a dark but iridescent liquid. He has light, rosy skin and short, choppy, bright blue hair. His eyes are eerily wide, showing three rings of pink, blue and yellow. They’re framed by pointy dark blue lashes. His outfit is reminiscent of a joker’s outfit on a card, using mostly the colours white and dark blue. The background is dark blue too, but starts lighter at the bottom. It is covered with yellow stars. The colours used are very bright, the palette dominated by blues and pinks.]
Youtube recommended video: can my hair handle a month without shampoo?
Me, who hasn’t used shampoo for 6 years: well golly gee, I dunno
IKR
What irritates me about these things - and those journalists who write articles on it going ‘Can I not wash my hair for a month?’ - is that almost all of them miss the point and none of them transition it properly, so they end up with a dirty and horrendously matted fleece and conclude that it’s just not possible, and like
I am now three years without shampoo. My hair, which I always wanted to grow super long my whole life but could never get past bra strap length without it snapping off, is now to my tail bone and thick and glossy. I no longer get scalp issues like dandruff. It curls almost without frizz. It’s great.
But I did have to transition it??! I didn’t just stop washing it Jesus Christ
Would either of you mind explaining how? I’ve tried before and I’ve tried looking it up, but the most useful things I’ve ever been able to find are along the lines of “replace your shampoo with this super awesome super expensive non-shampoo-thing” or something
Couple of reblogs/replies have asked, so I hope Elanor doesn’t mind me replying on this version!
Firstly, the following applies only to hair types 1-3. If you have coily/kinky hair, get advice from someone who knows type 4 hair, which I do not know that the same methods would work for (I have 2b, though it looks a little straighter as it’s weighed down by the thickness/length)
Secondly, I’m afraid you will need to buy something. Specifically a boar bristle/synthetic equivalent hairbrush (these can range from Very Expensive for all natural recognised brand to a tenner nylon version from Boots. I just bought a new one for £20 which is boar bristle and bamboo with some longer, stiffer nylon bristles. I recommend getting one with both kinds of bristles if your hair is thick). If you have type 2-3 hair, you will also need a means of detangling. A wide-toothed comb is ideal, preferably wood to reduce static
Brush your hair morning and evening with the bristle brush. This cleans out grime and redistributes oils along the length of your hair, and gradually reduce how often you wash your hair, going from (idr how often people shampoo? biweekly?) to weekly to every other week, a couple of months at a time. Your hair needs to learn it doesn’t have to produce as much sebum as it has been doing. You may find you still need to condition. You can do this with normal conditioner, hair masks, or coconut oil. There will be a bit of a process finding out what works best for your hair. Use the detangler before brushing
Honestly at this point the only time I deliberately get my hair wet is when I dye it, and I think it’s looking pretty good, don’t you? (And I’ve stopped getting split ends)
(ignore the frizz, we’re at 80% humidity here. If you still want it to smell nice rather than just of hair you can add in some non-alcohol-based perfume. Hair perfume is great and lasts ages because it evaporates slower that when on your skin. I like to just put a touch on my ends every few days)
I shall add to this to provide an Alternative Method!
I use a method known as CGM (Curly Girl Method - it’s a deeply stupid name). The bare bones of it is that you cut out shampoo entirely, and stop using any conditioners that contain either silicones or drying substances (those can include certain alcohols, for example). Hilariously, this often means you actually use much cheaper conditioners, because the lack of fancy substances brings the price down. In the UK, Sainsbury’s own brand apple conditioner works, for example, and costs less than £1 a bottle. You can find lists of CGM friendly products wherever you live online, though.
Anyway, yeah, let’s say your normal routine would be to wash with shampoo, condition, and brush every day.
With CGM, you wash with a combination of Increased Elbow Grease and conditioner. It’s called cowashing. You put the conditioner exclusively on your roots, and then scrub with your fingertips for a bit. Basically, it’s mechanical cleaning instead of chemical - like scrubbing food off a plate, using a bit of washing up liquid to lubricate, rather than dunking the plate into a vat of acid to burn off the food. Your scrubbing removes the oil and dirt from your hair, and the conditioner both reduces damage by making it slippery and also collects all that dirt. Then you completely rinse it clear.
After that, depending on your hair type, you do a conditioning round. My husband has straight hair so doesn’t bother. I have curly hair, so at this point I switch to something more nourishing like Faith In Nature and whack that in.
Crucially, this is literally the only point I brush it. Soaking wet, full of conditioner. And I very gently detangle with a wide toothed comb, or even my fingers.
(Then I scrunch it to start the curls forming, rinse it all out while still scrunching, and then scrunch in a gel; but that’s not relevant to the question, it’s just how my routine goes.)
Anyway, the lack of sulphides and other harsh cleansers means your scalp stops panicking that it’s being dried out, and it ‘transitions’ to a state where it no longer over-produces sebum (this is also why it helps with dandruff for most people - no more cycle of harsh drying followed by clogged pores). For me, this transition phase lasted a week. It felt a bit greasy during this time, but after that week, it was fine. That’s fairly normal. Some people can rarely take up to six weeks, but most are like me. My husband had a delayed transition during his third week, but again, it lasted… I think maybe 10 days?
There was also a second, longer transition phase where the silicones that had coated my hair for years slowly fucked off, which meant the strands could slowly start taking in water again. Once that happened I got really good hair, here’s a pic from a year ago for reference:
It’s longer again now, as I say. ‘Tis a mane.
In any case, a friend of mine followed this method for a year, and then transitioned to using water only, no products. She now uses a bristle brush as described above. Nothing more.
That’s the bare basics! There is more to it, especially if you’re specifically doing it for curls, which are an art and a science. But that’s how you transition your hair to no shampoo.
Also something-something The Master consistently forces 13 to embody the idea of an angel in the timeless children and the set designs of the matrix room literally gives her a halo in some of the scenes where he literally places her on a pedestal against her will, and then next season she is literally turned into an angel alsoagainst her will by the division blah blah blah and 13 spends so much of her life being the things others expect or Force her to be against her will, but even her being placed as an angel figure (Traditionally viewed as a force of good and purity) is explicitly Bad in the narrative because she does not choose it, it is forced upon her, it is Not Her and not what she wants to be*.
[ID: a screenshot of a comment from reddit, with no username visible. The commend reads: This doesn’t make a ton of sense to me either. Setting aside the question of whether gender/sex is assigned or observed at birth, the gender I was assigned at birth was ‘boy.’ The gender I have now is ‘man’. Boys and men have different gender roles, and few adults identify as boys anymore. From this standpoint, every adult has a different gender than the one they had at birth. End ID]
Framing “girl” and “boy” as separate genders from “woman” and “man” is such an amazing take. it’s a framework that accommodates and explains so many trans experiences. Some trans people never were their AGAB. Some feel like they were their AGAB, but that that changed (usually when puberty hits, which is when you start “becoming a man/woman”. The accepted societal path is that girls grow up to into women, and boys grow up into men. But some girls grow up into men, and some boys grow up into women. This guy was a boy who grew up into a man, which generally works out pretty well for people. Some boys and girls grow up into people who aren’t men or women, even! It’s like this random cis guy skipped right over transgender 101, 102, 201, etc. and stumbled directly into Transgender Nirvana.
This is like one of the things in Kate Bornstein’s gender workbook! Maybe not exactly adult-child, it’s been awhile since I read it, but it offers some prompts for thinking about other gendered identity shifts that aren’t The Big Trans One.
How many people’s most beloved childhood stuffed animals are actually teddy bears, like I feel like that’s a thing someone made up. Reblog this and put what your longest owned and/or favorite stuffed animal as a child was in the tags, inquiring minds want to know
I feel like the fact that gendered pronouns even exist in the first place is a testament to the grotesque importance of gender within civilization as a means of stratification and control. When you refer to someone, why do you use pronouns for gender, of all things, given the grammatical reason for the existence of pronouns (to serve as a short substitute to a person’s name when referring to them repeatedly)? Under the logic of gendered pronouns, pronouns could be used to indicate any property or characteristic of an individual and yet they were chosen to indicate gender. Are the ideal physical characteristics and/or societal role of an individual, i.e., their gender, necessary to mention constantly in casual speech as a substitute for their name? The fact that gender is given so much importance in language is a clear illustration of society’s dependence on gender and the division of labor that comes therewith.
this is a great take and also a really entertaining time to let you know that grammatical “gender” of pronouns in sumerian was not divided as masculine/feminine but rather animate/inanimate, and the “animate” gender was used of humans, gods, and statues
There are languages with complex grammatical gender systems still around today as well!
Huh. Idk how I feel about this. Op, as a fellow Polish person, you probably know that in Polish for example the word for grammatical gender is ‘rodzaj’ (type, kind), and gendered pronouns apply not only to people but to all other classes of nouns as well. You’d use a feminine pronoun for a spoon, a neuter pronoun for a chair, and a masculine pronoun for a table. Plenty of other languages have more than two genders, or no gendered pronouns at all.
I don’t disagree with what you’re criticising about gender in society and I don’t disagree that language can be sexist. But gender in language is a means of classification. I don’t know that you can view it as inherently sexist or illustrative of anything, and I wonder if a lot of these doubts are only there because of the use of the word “gender” for both grammar and people.
janna windforce is the side character. type: reliable good end: time skip to a domestic life w/ love interest bad end: massacre by traitor https://en.shindanmaker.com/654716
