The Shampoo Manifesto

When our son Christian started Kindergarten, the school called me up within the first two weeks to ask if they could move him to second grade. Eep! We compromised at the halfway point, and he skipped just one grade. I had no question that he could handle the academics, but I had fears for junior-high years, and how tough it might be socially for a kid to be two full years younger than his classmates when everybody else hits puberty. And I confess I wasn’t wild about having him graduate high school and leave home just a month after his sixteenth birthday…

I was also guessing at the time that he might end up small for his age—his dad is Filipino and not much taller than I. As it turns out, though, Christian has stayed near the top-end of the growth charts for his age, and holds his own physically even with a year’s difference from his classmates. He and Keoni were running errands recently and ran into the father of one of Kapena’s football teammates; the guy asked Christian his age and then commented, “You Hawai’ians sure do have size!” My bemused guys didn’t correct his assumption about heritage (Christian refers to himself and Keoni as “peas in a pod,” but there’s not a genetic link there) but at least we can say that Christian passes for “Hawai’ian size”…

I’m glad of that, because here we are in the Junior High years I used to worry about. Christian commented casually a few weeks ago that he’s figured out how to deal with bullies: laugh at them. I’m tickled that he’s exhibiting more wisdom at eleven than I could have claimed even in college—but there’s also the Mama-Bear stomping around in my head with her hackles up, growling “Bullies?!”

Christian has an understanding sympathizer l in Keoni, whose comparative age relative to grade-level was almost exactly the same. Keoni really was big for his age (Hawai’ian size?)–by ninth grade he topped six feet and weighed in at more than 200 pounds. But he says his athletic abilities took a while to catch up to his size. In high school he was All-American on the football field and League Champion three years running for wrestling–but in junior high teams would pick him for his size and then leave him on the bench because of his lack of coordination or skills. Junior high was a pretty miserable time for him, and he remembers unpleasant social run-ins characterizing those years when classmates were ahead of him in everything but size…

Christian is remarkably solid in his sense of self, comfortable in his own skin, and unconcerned with what other people think—a combination of traits that’s truly a blessing at Junior-high age—so when he shared with me that his scalp has been really itchy and his curly hobbit-hair haunted by dandruff, he’s really much more bothered by the itchiness than about the “social ramifications” of dandruff. (At the same time, though, I’m thinking of my own 7th-grade dandruff issues, and particularly the locker-room bully who made sure everybody heard her proclamations that I was “dirty”… To her way of thinking, dandruff was an indication that I must not be showering.) No need to burden Christian with my baggage—but happily I think we can take care of both the dandruff and the itching. Time for DIY-Mom to re-open the shampoo factory!

We’ve been making our own shampoo for this household, so I asked Christian if he’d like me to research anti-dandruff ingredients and make a special batch that he could take to his dad’s house. He answered with a resounding “Yes, please!”—so here’s our first recipe… We’d already harvested the lavender we grew this summer, so I started by stripping a couple stalks of their flowers and using a mortar and pestle to smash them up in order to release the oils. I gathered the mashed blooms into a coffee filter tied up with a rubber band (my home-made version of a tea-bag), which went into a cup of water in a small pot, brought to a boil before I turned off the stove and let the lavender steep for thirty minutes.

Half a cup of the lavender-water went into the shampoo bottle (an old hand-soap bottle with a pump), and I saved the rest for conditioner. The remaining shampoo ingredients: half a cup of Castile soap, and 13 drops each of tea tree oil & rosemary oil. Tea tree oil acts as both an anti-fungal and an anti-bacterial agent, and has been clinically proven as effective in treating dandruff. Rosemary and lavender are also included on almost every list of natural remedies for dandruff; lavender is said to help balance the natural oils on the scalp, and both plants contain compounds that relieve itching. I’m not sure on the amounts with the oils–10 to 15 drops seemed to be a common recommendation, so I went with our lucky number 13. We’ll see how it works, and go from there!

The conditioner I made for Christian is a variation of the one Keoni and I have been enjoying for a few months now. Christian actually likes the smell of vinegar (a quirk we probably owe to his taste for salt-and-vinegar chips)—which is a good thing, since most of our home-made household cleaners have a vinegar base! It also helps here, since he doesn’t mind coming out of the shower smelling rather strongly of vinegar. (Keoni and I usually rinse it out when we use it, but it’s also effective as a leave-in conditioner.) This one is easy to make; I used the remainder of the lavender-water, mixed in a one-to-one ratio with apple cider vinegar, and poured into a spray bottle (recycled from its original incarnation as a hairspray spritzer).

And finally: the scalp scrub! This one is similar to the body-scrub I like to use on my arms & legs, but here I used coconut oil because it is not only a deep moisturizer, but also has natural anti-fungal properties. Coconut oil can be a little tricky to work with, because it’s solid at “room temperature,” but liquid in a warm room. My home-made deodorant, for example, has a coconut-oil base, and it’s much easier to apply it now than it was in the summer when our hot weather turned it liquid… In this case I wanted the oil to be somewhat liquid, to get that crumbly-wet consistency that’s easy to scoop out and apply, so I went half-and-half with coconut oil and vegetable oil.

I melted the coconut oil in the microwave so it would be easier to mix (I didn’t want to heat it after mixing in the sugar, because the sugar would start melting and lose its “sharp edges”), then stirred together the two oils and the brown sugar. I didn’t measure amounts for this one, just kept adding brown sugar until it had the consistency I wanted—clumping together in a crumbly mixture. The pumpkin pie spice (cinnamon, nutmeg, & allspice) is just to make it smell yummy.

The brown sugar acts as an exfoliator, scrubbing away dead skin cells and semi-solid sebum (scalp-oil) build-up. Christian had showed me the white crud that collected under his fingernails when he scratched his scalp—and he commented that he’s glad he has a mom “who doesn’t get grossed out easily!” His comment brought to mind our recent trip to the dentist—Keoni needed a tooth pulled (Medicaid’s only dental “coverage” is for pulling a tooth when it gets too infected to leave in a mouth) and I asked the dentist if I could see the extracted molar. He hesitated, then asked if I get “squeamish.” I was about to answer that I was a biology major (thinking of all the dissections I used to do), but Keoni beat me to the punch with a more pertinent answer: “She’s a mom!”

When the kids arrived for their weekend with us, I had “Hobbit shampoo,” “Hobbit conditioner,” and “Hobbit scalp scrub” ready for a test run, and labeled with the nickname I’ve used since Christian’s curly hair first grew in. I suggested that he hop in the bathtub with his swimsuit on, and I’d give him a thorough scalp massage with his new scrub (and the additional tool of mom-fingernails!)

We’ll have to wait and see about long-term use, but the initial report on the test-run is positive—the gunky build-up was gone after scrubbing, his head wasn’t itching or flaking over the weekend, and even the scabbing seemed to be on its way to clearing up. When he headed out the door to his dad’s truck at the end of the weekend, he thanked me for his home-made hair-care products, and also for the head-rub. “I needed the Mommy-ing,” he confided as he hugged me. That’s definitely my favorite new word.

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And on the topic of interesting words… We were quite bemused by the labeling on the Castile soap. I’d ordered the most inexpensive version I could find—“Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps” unscented baby-mild Castile liquid soap. The center of the label contains the usual ingredients and information: the soap is made primarily from olive oil, hemp oil, coconut oil, and jojoba oil; it’s USDA-certified organic,  entirely biodegradable, vegan-friendly, packaged with 100% recycled materials, and Fair Trade certified by IMO….

So far, so good. But that information takes up a small central section of the label, and the entire remainder of the bottle is covered in tiny print that has nothing whatsoever to do with shampoo—except, perhaps, for the maxim that “cleanliness is next to godliness”… I hardly know how to describe the rest of the text. It’s sort of religious, sort of a social rant, sort of incoherent, and sort of a bizarre writing-style, liberally sprinkled with exclamation points and incomplete sentences and repeated phrases and long runs of words strung together with hyphens…

The opening to one long section first caught my eye with its reference to my totem, the owl:

Arctic White Owls by Birth-Control survive: the female does not go into heat until she sees three full months of frozen food for her young ones to survive! Putting to shame our welfare-state, with its untrained masses, enslaved by Marxist half-true hate!

The text goes on to describe (sort of) the “God-Inspired Moral ABC of Mama Cat,” a list of 13 items introduced as the lessons every mother cat supposedly teaches its young. Who knew that our cat was such a complex creature, not to mention religious! Here’s #13, just to give a sample:

13th: Free, brave! No Marxist slave! Mama Cat’s ABC of Love and the Swallow’s Song inspired by the Kingdom of God’s Law! All-One! Above! Above! All swallows evolve united to perfect pilots by full-truth, hard work, God’s Law, trained brave! No slave! Brave! Always evolving-united, free in All-One-God-faith! Hardworking, self-disciplined, no parasite-blackmail, welfare-slave! Therefore, brave we live to teach-work-love-inspire-unite! All-One! Win Victory! Help get it done! Teach to unite All-One! All-One! All-One! For these are the days my friend, we know they’ll never end! We’ll work-sing-dance-love marching on! Marching on! We’ll teach how to Love God’s Way! We’ll fight for it, OK! For we’re young and sure to unite All-One! All-One!

I read the whole bottle in fascination, and there’s an underlying theme of love and inter-connectivity, both among humans and between humans and God. God would probably approve that message—but it’s a message that’s nearly buried in eccentric ranting and inexplicable tangents. I was curious enough to look up Dr. Bronner on Wikipedia, and wasn’t surprised to read that he’d been committed at one point to a mental institution, which he “escaped” after receiving shock treatments. (I wonder now if he wrote this before or after shock-therapy…)

His story is kind of a sad one—he was a third-generation Jewish German soap-maker who left Nazi Germany and tried unsuccessfully to convince his parents to do the same. The last he ever heard from his parents, before they died in a Nazi death camp, was a postcard from his father saying simply: “You were right.” Soap-making, to him, was secondary to spreading his “philosophy.” He lectured all over the United States (his sojourn in the mental institution followed an arrest for public speaking without a permit), giving away soap samples pretty much as an afterthought. When he realized people showed up for the soap and didn’t stay for the lectures, he started printing his message on the soap bottles themselves.

It seems that in some ways he acted on his love-messages with generous charitable donations from his soap company… But it also seems as if he only acted on a “big-picture” scale, rather than in his personal interactions—when his wife died, he put his kids in foster-care so they wouldn’t interfere with his lecture circuit.

Inc. magazine ran a fascinating article on the business, now being run by Bronner’s grandson David, who is described as “a ponytailed marijuana activist who drives a rainbow Mercedes that runs on French fry grease.” (“The Undiluted Genius of Dr. Bronner’s,” April 2012.) It’s a fascinating story of family and philosophy and marketing—and not a little madness.

Regarding our own soap-making, one of Christian’s bright ideas for our proposed Hawai’i Bed & Breakfast is a gift shop, where our guests could purchase items like our specialty home-made soaps. I think, though, that we’ll keep our labeling a little simpler!