never buying shampoo again?

i finally tried it. i finally tried the hippie-frugal-elementary school science project baking soda hair wash and vinegar rinse.
and i'm never buying shampoo again.
i'm a sucker for b&b products (bath and beauty, y'all). i got all my handmade soaps from alaska- strangely enough- the ones i'm using now are from gladheart acres (the rise and shine is probably my favorite; it's citrusy enough to wake me up in the morning) and a wonderful intro to the family/company from my m.i.l. i also have their solid lotion stick and love it.
i've got my eye on some more soaps from alaska, swanmountain's rose soap looks divine, and there's a guinness soap on there that would make my hub smell like, well, delicious beer. perhaps it's a good thing he doesn't drive, no?
and i love bath salts and bombs and bubbles, having been clued into the pleasure of a leisurely bath and cup of coffee/cup of tea/glass of wine and a paperback by my gran when i was quite young.

but the one thing that's never excited me is shampoo. sure, sometimes it smells good but a person who has a bee sting allergy is generally not crazy about her hair smelling like flowers. i dislike the plastic bottles that must be stood on their heads to get the last bits out with those farty-sounding squeezes. and then there's the markup. and crazy-long lists of ingredients. and the condescending "lather, rinse, repeat if you've been soaking your head in motor oil" nonsense.
sure, some shampoo makers have tried to liven things up for me by putting jokes or trivia or faux-biographical vignettes on the bottle. i'm an inveterate reader, the type that can't keep herself from reading when there's words. eventually those words get old.
so anyway. needless to say, i'm not a huge fan of shampoo, but i do like clean hair.

enter the baking soda/vinegar thing. read about it in bust a couple of years ago when i still thought bust was der poo. it's come up again a couple of times since then and every time i've seen it, i've thought, you know, i'd try that. when i came across this blog entry i was ready. i bought a giant jug of vinegar a couple of weeks ago thinking to start cleaning with it. and for cooking. so far it works great on the bathroom sink, with some baking soda, and not so great on the mirror.
if that same elementary school project doesn't fail me, baking soda's a base, and vinegar, of course, is acidic. i know from extensive at home wild hair coloring projects and fiber work that vinegar is used to neutralize ph and smooth hair shafts back out. armed with this knowledge and baking soda paste and diluted vinegar in an old water bottle with a cinnamon stick & orange essential oil in, i washed my hair.
no lather, plenty of rinse, zero need to repeat.
the fine, straight, tending towards limp and oily hair is quite happy. it smells faintly of orange and not of salad dressing, which is good. it was cheap. cheap enough to where i can't really estimate how cheap it was. maybe two tablespoons of baking soda?
and that's good because that means i can use my pennies for delicious handmade soap.
oh yes and more yarn.
noro niji is good to me, and therefore i return to yarn garden to extend this series.