I have long hair. Very long hair. And for most of my life I did what everyone does — I washed it with shampoo. I bought the ones that said "natural" on the label, the ones with pictures of plants and flowers, the ones that cost more because they were supposed to be better. I never really questioned it.
Then I started making my own soap.
It began as a craft thing — lye and natural oils, the old way. And as I started understanding what goes into a bar of soap, I started reading the backs of the bottles in my shower. Sulfates. Silicones. Preservatives I could not pronounce. Ingredients that exist not because your hair needs them, but because they make the product foam, smell good, and last eighteen months on a shelf.
"The shampoo industry does not sell you clean hair. It sells you dependency — and a new plastic bottle every few weeks."
What hot showers and Dutch water were doing to me
I grew up in the Netherlands. And like most Dutch people, I showered hot. Every day, sometimes twice. It felt clean. It felt normal. Nobody questions it.
But hot water strips your scalp of its natural oils — the ones your body produces specifically to protect and moisturise your hair and skin. And when those oils are stripped away, your body goes into panic mode and produces more. So you wash again. And it produces more. It is a cycle the industry quietly benefits from.
Water in the Netherlands is also very different from the water you find here in West Africa, or in Indonesia, or in most of the world. Dutch water is hard — high in minerals like calcium and magnesium. Hard water does not rinse soap and product out of hair cleanly. It leaves a residue. So your hair feels heavy and dull, and you reach for more product to fix it, and the cycle continues.
I did not understand any of this while I was living it. It just felt like my hair was always a problem to manage.
The transition nobody warns you about
When I stopped using commercial shampoo, the first few weeks were not beautiful. My scalp went into a kind of withdrawal — still trying to compensate for the stripping it had been used to for years. My hair felt heavy. I questioned everything.
But I kept going. I washed with my homemade soap — olive oil, coconut oil, shea butter — and rinsed with diluted lemon juice on the scalp every couple of weeks. Nothing else. No bottles. No ingredients list I needed a chemistry degree to understand.
And slowly, my hair recalibrated. It found its own balance. The excess oil production calmed down. The texture changed — softer, not stripped. It started behaving like hair that was being taken care of rather than hair that was constantly being rescued.
What the industry does not want you to know
The shampoo bottle is one of the most brilliant pieces of marketing ever invented. It is sold to you as a necessity. But humans washed their hair for thousands of years without it. What changed is not what our hair needs — it is who profits from what we use.
The "natural" label on most shampoos is almost meaningless. There is no regulated standard for what natural means in cosmetics in most countries. A bottle can contain mostly synthetic surfactants and still carry pictures of argan trees on the front.
And then there is the plastic. Billions of shampoo bottles end up in landfill or oceans every year. Each one taking hundreds of years to break down. We are paying money to damage our hair and our planet at the same time.
Where I am now
I am writing this from West Africa, where I have been travelling slowly for months. I have no bathroom cabinet full of products. I have my soap, my oils, my lemon rinse. My hair is long and it is fine. Better than fine.
The hardest part was not the transition. It was unlearning the idea that I needed to buy something to take care of myself. That my body was not capable of finding its own balance without an industry's help.
It is. Yours is too.
This was just the beginning of my journey away from industrialised products — one by one, slowly, with a lot of curiosity and a little patience. Soap was first. It will not be the last story I write here.