Frugal Beauty, Eh?

This post about "looking good on a budget" on Get Rich Slowly cracked me up.  For example:

"I’ll tell you a secret: I haven’t washed my hair in weeks. I rinse it with water every morning when I take my shower (in my fancy, newly-repaired shower that now features hot and cold running water!). But I only shampoo and condition it about once a month. When I do, I use a 50-percent solution of shampoo and water. This means I’m using about 1/60th of the shampoo I used to use when I washed my hair every day with full strength shampoo. Needless to say, one bottle of shampoo lasts me a whole lot longer."

Where to begin?

(1) This really saves very little money.  Yes, reducing shampoo usage to 1/60th is a large reduction, but shampoo isn't expensive.  I really don't know how many bottles of shampoo I use in a year, but let's say a person uses one bottle per month, which seems like a lot, at a cost of $5 per bottle - that's $60 per year.  So this barely-shampooing tactic saves $59 per year, or 16 cents per day.  That's pretty damn trivial, in my view.

(2) OK, so you save your 16 cents per day (or whatever) but at what cost to your personal hygiene? I do not find it plausible that any but the very smallest proportion of people (if any) will have hair that is no oilier, dirtier, smellier, more unmanageable, or more generally disgusting when left unwashed 30 days out of 31. If you live a normal working-class or up existence in the US in the 2010s (and are not some kind of freak in the tail end of the distribution of scalp-oil production who never sweats, etc.), you do not have walking around in unwashed hair as a serious option.  And if you send your kids to school this way, the school will (at least they did when I was a kid) do an intervention.

(3) Does giving herself such an infrequent, low dose of shampoo actually do much good beyond the even cheaper option of never shampooing at all?

(4) And how about other needless expenses - deodorant, body soap, laundry detergent for cleaning clothes?  Why not eliminate all of these.  And live on the street while you're at it (I mean, you already will have the look for it).

It is not hard to write frugal living advice when all you're saying is, Don't spend money. Period. Even on things that all the people around you think are basic necessities of modern life. You know, like soap.

I admit that I think the idea of not shampooing is pretty much crazy, but I understand that some people argue that all this shampooing is screwing up the body's natural ability regulate oil production and whatnot.  (I don't know if this is an extension of popular heuristics like "natural is good" and "ancient practices [e.g., like before people started shampooing regularly] are good" or what.  I mean, yes, people used to not wash their hair (or bathe or whatever) as often as they do these days, but that doesn't necessarily mean squat regarding how clean they were. Maybe standards for cleanliness have changed and what was acceptable in those days is not acceptable now - you know, like dumping shit into the gutters to be washed away after a rain.)  Whatever.  If that's the case, the argument for giving up (or greatly reducing) shampooing should be about hair health and/or appearance, but the argument on that blog post is about the expense, and I don't get it.

I would also like to question the usage of the term "no poo" for the no shampoo movement.  Is the "poo" = "shampoo" equivalence intended for us to view shampoo in a negative light?  Cause it's hard to see this without laughing when people who don't wash their hair have hair that looks like shit.