What Happens if you Wash Your Hair Every Day?

Generally speaking: The main ingredient is shampoo is a surfactant. Surfactants have both hydrophilic and hydrophobic groups, making them great at dissolving oil. If you haven’t noticed when you do dishes: water alone doesn’t do a great job. You need a good surfactant to speed up the process.

So soap, shampoo, they all do a great job of breaking down the oils on your hands/hair, which then wash out with the water. (Side note: You can also use oil to break down oil, but it takes a lot of agitation.) Did I say break down? I meant strip. Surfactants strip your skin and hair of oils, then you add them back with conditioner.

Does that sound unnecessary? Probably because it is.

When you wash your hair daily, you are speeding up a feedback cycle, feeding the need to wash your hair more frequently.

If you wash your hair every day - depending on your body, skin type, etc - most likely, your body will overproduce oil to make up for that stripping of oil, in an attempt to maintain homeostasis. The oil is a protective barrier for your skin; your skin wants it back when you take it away.

For me, daily washing is a big no-no. Add in the fact that the most common surfactant used in shampoo is sodium lauryl sulfate - which really agitates my (and lots of other peoples’) sensitive skin, and I’ve got excess oil on top of dandruff on top of a hot ass mess.

There’s a lot to this whole business, but if you’re interested, I’d research more on co-washing.

I stopped shampooing my hair (or washing/conditioning it daily) a few months ago. When I stopped taking birth control, my oil production got super out of whack, and I had to do something to control it. The first thing was halting the artificial cycle that was feeding the need to shampoo daily.