Back in September of 2005 Matt Metzgar had an interesting blog post, in which he discussed the idea that humans were subject to sexual selection, just as any other species is. At the time he was reading, “Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty” by Nancy Etcoff. The basic idea is that what people find beautiful (attractive in a potential mate) will be subject to selection just like any other trait. If a visible trait indicates health, and health correlates with greater inclusive fitness, then people who find that trait desirable will tend to pick those healthy mates, and thereby leave greater numbers of offspring. Eventually those genes which code for that preference will increase to the point that that visible trait will become one of the standards of beauty.
One such trait people desire is shiny and bright luxurious hair. The puzzle here is that in order for a trait to be selected it must exist. So back in the hunter gatherer days a significant number of people must have had reasonably healthy looking nice hair in order for it to have become an object of desire. Today we have shampoos and conditioners, but back in those days how did people get such hair? When people don’t shampoo daily they tend to end up with greasy disgusting hair, so wouldn’t they have had greasy hair also in the Paleolithic days?
No, it turns out they didn’t. What has been happening in modern times is that when someone washes their hair daily they strip out the oils. The body responds to this by increasing the amount of oil it releases, so that if now someone stops shampooing their body will overproduce oil for a while, making their hair greasy.
Some people, through accident or design, have stopped washing their hair, and the result, after an adjustment period, is nice healthy looking hair. For example, Matt points towards Peggy Weynberg who stopped shampooing her hair 11 years ago, and it looks fine to me. In the hunter gatherer days if someone had good nutrition, and was in overall good health, they would have had nice hair, since hair is, in effect, designed to clean itself.
When I read Matt’s post I stopped shampooing my hair, and all I did was run water through it after a workout. About a year later my boss asked me what I was doing for my hair, since it looked so great. When I had one woman smell my hair, not knowing the protocol I was using, she said it was fine. “It smells like you are using a shampoo with no perfume in it, or just like hair alone would smell.”
The same principles also apply to using soap. My body stopped itching, and I was able to stop using Eucerin, when I stopped using soap. So when I shower now I just use plain water.
Tags: Hunter Gatherer, Hygiene, Natural Living, Primitivism
[...] up on a previous post, (You Don’t Need to Shampoo Your Hair (Or use Soap) – Lost Wanderer) Boing Boing has just blogged (Body washing with water alone) about a report by Free the Animal [...]