Truth: It will get better!!

Info about how hair should feel after detox

Q: Thank you for providing so much detail on how the clay hair wash should be used. My question is related to what kind of result we should expect to see at the end of detox, which is not specified on the Hair Help page.

According to your website, the mud hair wash will remove all the chemicals that create the fake healthy look. What will the detoxed hair look like? Will your hair wash product repair and strengthen the detoxed hair with long term use? If I don't have the fake smoothness or the fake shine, will I ever get a real shine or real smoothness? Will my hair get stronger and shed less? Or will I just get the miserable truth about how my naked hair really looks?

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A: The hair care industry phrase that you used in your email -- "repair and strengthen" -- is a phrase used to describe what a hair care product is advertised to do for one's hair. It is a common personal care industry romantic marketing phrase used to allude to the process of coating hair (that has been damaged/weakened by chemical processing) with plastic polymers to reinforce degraded and broken hair. Emotional and/or aesthetic adjectives such as "texturizing", "shine ingredients", "proteins", "volumizers", etc., are often used in place of the more accurate industrial/technological phrase "plastic polymer bonding agents" in an attempt to distance the customer's perception of the ingredients from what they actually are -- synthetic chemical plastics.

Your understanding of the hair detox is fairly accurate, although your comment about getting "the miserable truth about how my naked hair really looks" might be a little extreme. : ) If your hair has not been bleached, permed, straightened, dyed, or otherwise chemically- damaged, your hair is likely to have minimal damage from the shampoo detergents that you have used. The more natural one's hair (and the shorter one's hair), the shorter the detox transition, and the more likely it is that one will be satisfied with the look and feel of the hair without all of the synthetic plastic coating agents. As everyone's hair is different, widely so, and as an individual's hair care product choices and treatments vary greatly, it is not possible to predict each person's level of satisfaction with his or her hair after going through the detox. We'd like to share, however, that our Pure Earth Hair Wash line is definitely very popular with many thousands of happy, and long-term users.

An interesting opportunity that one may choose to experience after moving away from washing one's hair with detergent shampoo products is to not use any detergent shampoos, or conditioners, or styling products for a year or so and then, as an experiment, wash your hair with a conventional detergent shampoo. You will then get to experience how unnatural and, frankly, freaky the polymers feel on your hair. Feeling the polymer coating agents on your natural -- "naked" -- hair, after being away from them for a long time, is a truly bizarre feeling!

When one follows the instructions in our Hair Wash article on our web site, and takes care to be patient, most folks have a smooth transition and enjoy the hair washing experience, and the good results with their hair.