What is Cowashing?

Cowashing is short for Conditioner Washing

Which means... washing your hair with conditioner!

That's right. You can use a Curly Girl (CG) approved conditioner (no sulfates or silicones!) to wash you scalp and hair. Why is that? There are cleaning agents in your conditioner. Really!

But even though conditioner has cleansing agents in it, you can't just suds it up with a few quick rubs as you would with a sulfate-rich shampoo. To clean your hair, you gotta work! The cleansing ingredients, plus your manual labour, work in tandem to clean your hair without stripping your scalp of its natural oils.

Step One
Apply a generous amount of conditioner to your scalp

Step Two
Rub and scrub every square inch of your scalp. Rub your fingers in circles all over your scalp for at least two minutes - ideally, five. Rub your scalp until your arms hurt! Run your down your hair as well.

Step Three
Rinse completely and continue to rub your scalp and your hair as you rinse. This gets it all out and cleanses your hair as you rinse.

Step Four
Condition as normal. You can now rinse all of this new conditioner out, rinse some out, or leave it all in. Experiment and see what your hair prefers.

You may find your hair to be a tad greasy the first few days. This is normal. It's your scalp and hair transitioning to this new life where it doesn't have to overproduce the natural oils every day because they've been stripped away. After a couple of washes, you will be just fine.

If your harms hurt while cleaning, you can get a little scalp massage brush (from Sally Beauty Supply, Beauty Supply Outlet, Cloré, Chatters, Amazon) to rub your scalp while cleaning.

Or, a handful of raw sugar (the big crystals) mixed with your conditioner works, too.

Comments

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