One of the biggest shockers to our straighter hair friends is the lack of times that women with curly hair wash their curls. For some, wash day comes once every other day. For others, once a week. Still others, maybe once every other week.

It isn’t that our hair is dirty, per se, but it’s that those essential oils that make our hair so shiny and strong and super sexy awesome need a bit more time to coat our curls and kinks than just one day. That, and we’re lucky enough to have texture that actually looks better on that third, fourth, fifth day of wear. And for us, that just saves time and money, y’all.

Come to find out, washing your hair on a daily basis is a relatively new concept. In fact, before the 1920s, it was recommended that you wash your hair eight times a year. No joke.

According to some awesome research that the editorial team over at The Week dug up, writer Annette Kellerman wrote this in 1918:

The frequency of the shampoo is a matter which, to a certain extent, you must decide for yourself. Every three weeks I should say was about right on the average, although many women do not require a shampoo oftener than every four or even six weeks.

By that average, even those of us with the least wash days on our calendar are grabbing the cleansing conditioner much too often.

But, it gets better! Back then, the homemade recipes that the natural hair community has become famous for were the only way to get a good wash in.

In 1901, this particular piece of advice was published in The Woman Beautiful:

There is no better shampoo for the hair than an egg, well-beaten with about an ounce of water, and rubbed thoroughly into the scalp. It is not merely a detergent, cleansing the scalp and hair of the dirt, but is tonic in its effect and strengthens the scalp. The yolk contains natural food for the hair, iron and sulphur; while the white, being a mild alkali, finds its congenial mate in the oil from the sebaceous glands, and they mingle in a saponaceous lather. 

I mean, we do know that egg is a great conditioner and promotes the strengthening of your hair, so I guess they weren’t too far off (blog post for the first one out there to try this shampoo method and report back!”>. Of course, if an egg wasn’t enough for you to fully cleanse your scalp of all the dirt that had accumulated over the past month or more, then this good ol’ recipe was in your hair care arsenal: 

Shampoo Cream

  • New England rum 1 pint
  • Glycerine 2 ounces
  • Carbonate of potash 1 ounce
  • Borax 1 ounce
  • Carbonate of ammonia 1 ounce 

Hm. If my chemistry is right, that mixture could seriously and quite literally explode.

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