As they so often do, this latest project bubbled up from many accumulated nuggets of knowledge stored in my frontal lobes almost by osmosis. I apologize that I don't have a picture to go with it, so I scalped this one from teh interwebz:
it's about the same color as my hair maybe slightly more red, and the shine is definitely comparable (as described later in this post)
I had noticed that my hair lately (aside from being in desperate need of a trim) was starting to look like a bale of alfalfa. So, not pretty. I went to my fridge, pulled out my container of coconut oil, looked at it, “hmmm”-ed for a minute, and scooped some out into a small container. Then I wandered around my kitchen hunting for other ingredients to add to my hair-repair concoction. I settled on honey, and poured about an equal amount of honey in. I then microwaved it for about 30 seconds, just enough to melt the coconut oil (I keep it in the fridge because it only stays solid below 76 and my cabinets all seem to be warmer than that) and stirred the heck out of it to combine the honey and coconut oil. They seemed to be somewhat averse to each other, and by the time I got to the shower I had to shake the container a bit to re-combine them.
Once I had wet my hair pretty thoroughly, I poured the oil-honey mixture into my hands and applied it liberally from root to tip, and massaged it into my scalp too. It was still warm from the microwave, which was really relaxing! (I wonder if it had the added benefits that are supposed to come with those hot oil treatments that used to be so popular?) I slathered on some of my normal conditioner too, just for kicks. After all the normal showery stuff – body washing, shaving, exfoliating, etc – I took a wide-tooth plastic comb and ran it through my hair to detangle it. Then I rinsed it as best as I could. Surprisingly it seemed to rinse almost clean, after which I applied shampoo. By this point the deep conditioner had probably been on my hair for 15-20 minutes (it was one of those long, luxurious showers *smile*) and as I washed it clean, I could already tell there was a huge difference. The last thing I did was my apple cider vinegar rinse to restore the hair’s natural ph. I couldn’t wait to see how it looked and felt once dry!
I did my typical routine of letting it air dry, then blow drying it almost dry with a paddle brush, then setting it in velcro rollers. As I was doing this, the texture felt much smoother and softer, and it was already looking much shinier.
When it was completely dry, after I had taken out the rollers and brushed it through, I was literally astounded. My hair looked completely virgin and healthy. When I stepped outside later and glanced at the strands, they were literally glistening in the sun as if I had used a shine serum filled with crushed diamonds. Ok maybe that’s a slight exaggeration. But it was super shiny for reals!
This was definitely one of my better experiments, and one I plan to continue using often! I made it for a friend, but I added grapeseed oil to hers. So that will be going in the next batch I make for myself!
This is a fact sheet on the ingredients I give to people I make this for:
A couple notes: dark hair will usually have more noticeable shine than lighter hair, although this is actually a sort of optical illusion. Dark pigments absorbs more light while fairer strands actually reflect it, but darker hair shows a greater difference in the contrast between light areas and dark areas.
