22nd Aug - Hair today gone tomorrow (apologies it's a long one)

Don't get me wrong, I really want to spend every evening and weekend in Tahiti but I also need to do boring household stuff like cook meals when Si dares to be in the garage and not chained to the kitchen with a hot meal waiting for me when I pull onto the driveway.

Which is why Tuesday night I had to cook a meal and have a strict talk to myself about it being ok to not go to the allotment but instead pursue another nagging interest that I'd been wanting to get on with. Make Shampoo and Conditioner!

I've been bothered for quite some time about the amount of plastic bottles I have in my bathroom and started to look into ways of improving this. Also my hair needs washing every day as it seems a bit on the oily side and I have a constant nag that no matter what the bottles promise, they never do flatten the frizz, caress the split ends and take me to an amazing jungle where I can swim in a waterfall filled mountain lake whilst wearing exotic flowers in my hair. So I grabbed my trusty "Fragrant Pharmacy" book and set about ordering the items that I didn't have.

Fueled by a large glass of red wine, I decided tonight's the night to take my hair by the roots and finally become the shampoo super-model I had bottled up (reuseable not single use). Here's how it goes. The Fragrant Pharmacy book is a great book on covering healing, cleaning, well being in the modern world by using essential oils, etc. You follow recipes. Yes recipes. Dear friends that know me well, you already know what will transpire...

I gathered my Castile Soap liquid, distilled water, Lecithin and essential oils. Straight away I noticed that the recipe referred to castile soap flakes not liquid so I was proud to pause and engage rational thought that 100g of soap flakes in 1 ltr water would not be the same as 100g of soap liquid in 1 ltr water. I searched the internet for a recipe using castile liquid soap which seemed to be 50% of the water content. I wrote this down. With everything ready I found a large jug and set to work. I could have sworn the liquid soap was half that of water but I wrote down 100ml soap to 50ml water. Back on the internet I found the recipe and corrected my mistake. I made enough of the batch (stew) to cover the base liquid for shampoo and conditioner (ie: 500ml : 250ml mix).

The Shampoo bit was simple. Just the stew with a bunch of different essential oil drops, thyme, eucalyptus, peppermint, lavender and rosemary. Successfully mixed I poured the very watery mix into my reusable bottle. I knew it wouldn't froth as much as commercially bought products because I read it on the internet so it must be true.

Now for the conditioner. I read the recipe a gazillion times. Add 25ml of liquid lecithin to 50ml of soap stew. Liquid lecithin can only be described as a cross between tahini and marmite. It's sticky and gloopy and I dropped a spoonful into my stew and stirred. I stirred and stirred and it didn't mix in. Scratching my head I referred back to the recipe book and realised I should have been mixing it in over a bain-marie. My friends will start to understand now why i fail so much at baking and cooking: the famous baked pasta dish minus the pasta, cheesecake soup because it just didn't set, bread made with a table spoon of salt not a teaspoon. I just don't seem to a) have the built in common sense about the basics, b) know when to stop, bin it and start again. Of course I didn't bin it. No, no, no. Instead I took my jug to the kitchen and held it over a saucepan of boiling water and mixed it in as best I could whilst ignoring the steam burns I was getting on my hand.

Duly, er, mixed, I set about adding the 1/2 teaspoon each of vodka and sunflower oil, essential oils and the green clay i had knocking around, left over from last year's foray into making my own face packs! I mixed it all together. The clay didn't mix well so I set about sawing the lumps with a sharp knife -still not great but everything else was sludgy. Again, why don't I have a little voice telling me to stop!!!! I decided, naturally, that when I came to massaging the conditioner into my hair, I'd be able to crush the lumps and all would be good. Incidentally the conditioner is used once a week and left on for 10 minutes before washing off with shampoo. Alarmed, you should be and so should I have been.

At no point up to this point did I think of starting from scratch and so it came to pass that I was head upside down in my bathroom, sticking my hand into the marmite looking mess and rubbing it into my hair. Funnily enough the cold clay did not crush in my rubbing fingers. No, instead the lumps just sat on my hair and then simply fell off onto the floor. Still at least the rest would be ok so I bloody well carried on rubbing it into my hair! I set my stop watch and THEN decided to just double check the recipe. Oh what's that whole paragraph I missed say? Ah yes, that'll be the bit about mixing ALL the ingredients over a simmering bain-marie, clay included. Yes of course that would make total and logical sense. The clay would break up into powder and help to bind with the sticky lecithin resulting in a lovely conditioner to spread over my hair.

10 minutes later time to wash off with my new shampoo. Yelp, I couldn't even run my fingers through it to make sure it was wet everywhere. The shampoo was the consistency of water and squirted out of my palm and straight into the bath missing my head completely. I unscrewed the lid and had more success but no suds. I rinsed and repeated, and repeated, about 6 times in all. I could almost run my fingers through my hair and thought the dragging effect was possibly due to my hair now being soooooooo squeaky clean and free of chemicals that this was causing the drag. I drank the rest of the bottle of red wine to help take the pain away from my sore scalp where I'd been tugging so hard.

It gets worse! I don't like quitting so the next morning I washed my hair again with my new shampoo in the hopes that it would remove the rest of the the conditioner. I was in the shower a long time and eventually my wrinkly fingers could no longer hold the newly filled shampoo bottle so I got out and attempted to dry it. It sort of dried but there were a few clumped together bits a bit like the way the bristles on paintbrushes used for glue at primary school look. Off I toddled to work with a ponytail I hoped would dry out (yes it didn't occur to me to wash it with normal shampoo) and half an hour later I had plaited it because I didn't like the tacky feel of my hair and I couldn't stop feeling it.

The next morning...seriously what is wrong with me?...I washed it again in my shampoo I guess in the hopes that the draggy feeling was leftover conditioner and miraculously this would be the shampooing session that would remove it. It didn't. Simon commended me on my perseverance and then took me into the bathroom, bent me over the side of the bath and washed my hair in commercial shampoo. Oh the suds (eventually), oh the suds of the second wash and the feel of being able to run my fingers through my hair again.

So what have I learnt: a) My eyes/brain miss whole chunks of important stuff when reading recipes regardless of whether it's for cooking or not b) I have no mechanism to pick up on common sense c) I seem unable to be wasteful even when the best way forward is to start again d) I seem to be intent on making something work even when it really won't.

How have I moved forward from this?

I went to Lush on Saturday and bought a bar each of Shampoo and conditioner which is plastic free and I bought tins so that I can take them on holiday!