- Okay okay okay.
This is going to piss some people off.
Some of you are going to turn your backs on me forever,
sorry to see you go.
I have to tell you this reality.
I have not shampooed my hair for five years.
And yet those five years have been
some of the best five years of my hair's life.
No more itching, no more oily hair,
no more dandruff flakes,
just normal hair that does weird stuff sometimes,
but is generally happy.
Let me explain.
Go ahead, take a good look,
I know everyone's already doing it anyway, look at my hair.
I've never felt so conscious about my hair
because I'm talking about it.
Okay, so five years ago
I realized that I was in a cycle.
The cycle looked like this.
My head, which produces natural protective oils
would be washed with shampoo.
Shampoo is just a chemical that attaches
to these oils on your scalp,
and then when you wash that shampoo out
the oils are attached to them
and they leave, ridding your head of oils.
The shampoo also cleans off any pollen
or dust that's caught in your hair.
So my hair was now clean, very clean.
Oh yeah and this guy isn't me,
this is just a stock footage
representation of me five years ago.
Anyway, then goes in the conditioner,
which coats your hair with silicone material
that makes it shine,
and restores all of that shine that was lost
from stripping away all of those oils.
Man, I haven't used conditioner in a very long time
but I do remember that it makes your hair
feel like silky butter.
Silky butter, is that even a thing?
Okay, so you strip away the oils,
you coat it with this shiny silky conditioner,
and then my hair would end up
just being sort of like a fluff ball.
In order to style it I would put in some product,
like some fancy pomade I bought
at some fancy barber in Chicago.
This pomade is made of, wait for it, oil.
It is an oil based product.
So I'm putting oil back in my hair
after I just stripped it all out.
Meanwhile, my scalp is like whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa,
dude you just stripped away all this protective oil
that we make to protect your scalp, wtf.
And so it fires up it's natural oil making machine
to produce more oil for your hair.
So now you have double oil,
you've got the pomade and the natural oils.
So now by the end of the day
you start you feel like your hair is super oily
and greasy and you have all these messages
about dirty hair being greasy and oily.
- You have got greasy hair though bro.
- Aw come on man.
- So what's the cure for this oily greasy hair?
Shampoo.
- A deep cleansing shampoo.
It helps take away the excess dirt and oils
that can be inside your hear.
Right, I reckon we should give it a go
and get you washed up.
- Let's do it.
- And the whole cycle starts over again.
In my mid-20s I also started to realize
that my scalp was starting to become like itchy and flaky
which is so embarrassing, so uncomfortable,
and yet luckily out there in the world
there is a cure for this.
- [Narrator] The problem of flaking dandruff
can be solved
with just regular use of Proctor & Gamble's
new wonder shampoo, head and shoulders.
- Okay, listen, just a quick moment
to make it clear that this cycle
is my hair experience.
Which is based on not only my physiology and genetics,
but also on my standards
and relationship to society
and what society tells me to do with my hair.
So just to get this out of the way,
I'm not here to preach what's right for your scalp,
I'm simply telling you what's right for my scalp.
In fact there's this whole movement,
sort of a political movement around shampoo
and not shampooing, it's called no poo
which is a very unfortunate name for this movement.
I'm not a part of that movement, I'm not pushing that.
This isn't political for me,
I just want to tell you a story
about the journey of my hair
using a little bit of history and data and research,
and again most importantly, my own experience
of five years of not shampooing my hair.
Okay, so let's dive in.
Let's get some context here.
Human beings used to not wash their hair
very much at all.
It was only by the 1970s when ads
targeted mainly towards white women
would come out saying you need to wash your hair
every single day,
and that the dirt in your hair was weighing it down.
- That attract dirt and weigh hair down like this.
- And that in order to prevent this weighing down
and to get body,
you would have to use this product.
This also started a whole new set of messaging
around greasy hair, dirty hair,
which even saying it is like repulsive.
So demonizing the idea of greasy hair
and pushing this daily shampoo regiment
was seen as the only way to fight back
against this greasy hair epidemic.
Today, Americans wash their hair
around five of the seven days of the week.
By the way that's about double
how much they was their hair on average
in Spain and Italy.
And it's way more than the once a month
Americans used to wash their hair in the '30s.
So let me tell you the story of how this all went down,
because I didn't grow up as a non-shampooer.
Five years ago I had bought this really expensive
fancy tea tree oil based dandruff shampoo,
because I had so much itchiness and flakiness everywhere.
I was so tired of that,
and I was so embarrassed by it.
So I was diligent.
I would wash my hair with this
tea tree oil shampoo every day.
The marketing on this told me
that I shouldn't use any other shampoos,
that all the other shampoos were the devil,
and that this was the only thing I could use
to treat my dandruff.
I ran out of this shampoo
while we were on like a trip,
so I couldn't order it.
And I was just like okay when I get back
I'll order the shampoo and I'll get back onto it.
And it took a while, we were on some long trip,
I get back, I forget to order the shampoo,
I was getting worried about this.
But soon, after like three weeks
of this sort of fear of using other shampoos
I noticed that the itching started going away.
and that the greasy hair feel
started to actually level out.
It was actually okay, and I was secretly like
oh I'm probably,
I probably just got used to it or something.
But the key moment happened
when I went in to get a haircut
having not washed my hair with shampoo for like a month.
I was actually really nervous and conscious
of what the barber was gonna say to me,
and he didn't say anything.
So I asked him, I was like hey
how does my hair and scalp look to you?
And he was like looks good, it's a little dry,
but overall pretty healthy,
and that was the moment for me.
I was like wait what?
This guy who sees like dozens of scalps every day,
dozens of scalps, that's actually really gross,
like dozens of scalps,
I'm just never gonna say that again.
This guy sees a lot of scalps every day
and he blessed my unshampooed scalp,
and was like you're actually okay.
Now let me just remind you
that I've told some of my close friends this story before
and they have tried it
and it hasn't worked for them.
I'm not saying that this exact thing
is going to work for you.
The reason I am making this video
is because I want us to have reasons to be skeptical
of all the messages that we get fed
around this topic.
- [Narrator] Nourishing damaged hair back to healthy life.
- Regular washing is the only way
that you can get rid of that excess oils.
- I feel no grease.
- A few years ago I read this kind of obnoxious
business book that said that the best way
to market a product is to create a psychological trigger
that makes people need your product.
The example used in the book was this toothpaste
in like the '50s or '60s where the ad for this toothpaste
called attention to this quote dangerous coating
that robs the teeth of their whiteness.
Like this film coating that's on your teeth
every time you eat,
and it's like dangerous and bad
and socially unacceptable.
Turns out that this dangerous film on your teeth
is a harmless residue from food consumption,
and toothpaste doesn't remove it
any better than eating an apple.
So yes you should totally brush your teeth,
but not because there's this dangerous residue,
and now I can't unfeel it.
The psychological trigger is just baked in,
I can't not feel it and I feel judged
because I maybe have this dangerous coating.
This same dynamic happens today
with the 100 billion dollar hair care industry.
They push all sorts of scary ideas
about dirty things lurking in your hair
that only their product can fix.
And they get very rich because of it.
Telling you that you have grease in your hair
makes you feel dirty psychologically.
And what it does is it turns these
naturally occurring lipids, or fats in your hair
which are totally protective and naturally occurring
into this gross feeling dangerous thing.
And more and more these commercials
have these like fancy 3-D diagrams
to make it feel totally legit and medical.
There are medical things here
like dandruff is a real skin disorder,
that's something that has real symptoms
and should be treated in a real medical way
by a professional.
Not by a commercial with a fake doctor
showing you 3-D diagrams to sell a product.
And no, this lady is not a legit doctor, she's an actor.
While we're on the point of dandruff and itchy scalps,
let it be known that dry scalp,
which is not a skin disorder,
literally means that you don't have enough
hydration in your scalp, is not dandruff.
- But he's scratching his head, could be dandruff.
- And yet they share effectively the same symptoms,
itchy, flaky, but dry scalp, unlike dandruff,
is caused in part by, wait for it,
shampooing too much.
Drying out your scalp by stripping it
of its natural hydrating oils.
This was my problem in my 20s.
I didn't have dandruff, I thought I had dandruff
because I was shampooing my hair too much
and it was drying out my scalp
and making it dry and flaky.
All of this gets conflated
when corporations present their advertisements
as legit science that's meant to help you feel better.
But let's just quickly say it like it is,
the only thing they're doing
is trying to sell you a product
to make sure that you feel like
you need it as much as possible.
Where this becomes totally below the belt in my view
is when these commercials tell the story
of how you will be socially ostracized
if you don't use their product.
- [Narrator] Use Head and Shoulders every day.
- And this gets to the last point I wanna make here,
and potentially the biggest reason why I made this video.
I don't are about you shampooing your hair,
you probably should, you need to determine that on your own,
but let us just recognize
that we are social animals.
We live and die by what others think of us.
We strive to be accepted by the group at any cost.
And my big fear here
is that we have given the power
of what we need to do to be accepted
to these big corporations, these giant machines
who use this psychological dynamic
to sell us more of their stuff.
They have successfully turned hair
into a discussion of hygiene and cleanliness,
and now we talk about this
almost as a form of epidemiology.
Cleanliness and hygiene turns into
an issue of health and safety,
which let's be honest, brushing your teeth,
or washing your hands,
that stuff is there to stop us from spreading diseases.
I haven't washed my hair in five years
and there's not some virus that's gonna pop off my head
and go infect my family.
Oh that's a very strange image, head virus.
There are real skin disorders
having to do with the scalp,
those should be treated seriously.
But my sense is that we've conflated that.
We're not talking about health and disease prevention
a lot of the time.
We're talking about beauty and self-perception.
That's not epidemiology, that's personal psychology,
personal self-esteem, and societal standards.
That feeling of being dirty or greasy,
who determined that feeling?
Who set the parameters for that feeling?
It's not nature, it's not epidemiology.
If you had been born 50 years ago,
you wouldn't have that same feeling of being greasy.
It's not natural.
And even in 2021, if you were born in Spain,
you would less likely have that feeling
of just being dirty
that drives you to consume more and more of these products.
Which helps you build the nearly 100 billion dollar
hair care industry,
a huge portion of which is owned by just three companies.
L'Oreal, Proctor and Gamble, and Unilever
which find a million ways to feel like
you are dirty, you are undesirable,
and if you don't use their product,
you will be ostracized from society.
Just look at these commercials.
These companies have cracked the code on what drives us,
and it's fear and a desire to be accepted.
And this isn't just with hair,
this is with a million of these products
that tell us that we're inferior.
And if I'm saying this as a man in this society,
it is a thousand times worse for women.
So am I here telling you not to shampoo your hair?
No, do whatever you want.
You have a totally different hair experience than I do.
I'm sure stopping cold turkey like I did
probably isn't the right choice for you,
all I'm asking you is to scrutinize your standards,
and who is in control of the narrative
of what clean even means?
Okay, that's that.
Speaking of the psychology of self-esteem
in the 21st century,
I wanna tell you about the sponsor of today's video
which is Better Help.
It's an online tool
that allows you to connect with
a professional trained counselor
so that you can have therapy, but do it remotely.
I've been in therapy for the past year and a half,
and for the majority of that it's been remote,
I haven't been sitting in the therapist's office.
And I can't stress enough how important
it has been for me, my understanding of myself,
and my well-being as a person,
and as a husband, and as a father,
and as a brother, and as all the roles
that I play in my life,
therapy has been amazing.
Better Help is not a crisis line,
it is not a self-help scheme,
it is a platform for finding a counselor
and starting therapy so that you can
start to make strides in your mental health.
My favorite part about Better Help
is that it makes it free and easy
to change your counselors.
It often takes a while to find
the right therapist for your life.
With Better Help you have a ton of options,
as well as the ability to,
if you don't find a good fit,
at first or second or third
you can keep trying until
you find the right counselor for you.
Better Help is more affordable
than traditional counseling,
which can be fairly expensive,
and there is financial aid available.
Better Help wants you to start living
a happier life today,
and I am a major component of therapy
as an ongoing practice,
I wish it was more accessible, Better Help is making it so.
So go to BetterHelp.com/JohnnyHarris,
that's BetterHELP.com/JohnnyHarris
and join the over one million people
who are taking charge of their mental health
with the help of an experienced professional.
Clicking that link helps support this channel,
but it also gives you 10% off your first month of therapy.
Thank you Better Help for sponsoring this video,
thank you all for watching,
thank you patrons for your ongoing support,
hope some of you stick around
even though I don't wash my hair all the time.
Okay, see ya.