147 of 149 people found the following review helpful:

Here’s how to use this as a shampoo, among other uses., July 17, 2011

I didn’t see many reviews talking at length about using this as a shampoo, so I thought I would add one. Expect my personal experiences and opinion, identified as such, mixed in.

I use this soap for shampoo, body wash, face wash, I put it in my bath, I’ve used it to clean my counters, I’ve used it to clean dishes. The peppermint is my favorite, especially for soaking in the bath because it tingles and it’s the best scented in my opinion, also for shampoo, again because it tingles.

To clean, I put a little on a damp terry cleaning cloth or kitchen towel and just wipe. I use it on kitchen and bathroom counters, and I dissolve it in water to mop with. I prefer to use the tea tree for cleaning.

As a shampoo, I am puzzled by all the claims I had heard online about castile soap/saponified oil being drying to the hair, and I suspect that many of the people making those claims either haven’t tried it and are just perpetuating the general misconception, or maybe they are using it wrong (I’ll explain why I think that). This is an extremely gentle product. I have CURLY hair, and it is dyed(with one of those clairol nice n easy super harsh store bought dyes)(#124 natural blue black, if you want to know). Curly hair is generally more dry, and harder to keep conditioned, than straight hair, and mine is no exception. My hair is super fine and super dry, and prone to breakage. I find using this soap as shampoo is actually much LESS drying to my hair than other types of shampoo.

If you are going to use this as a shampoo, you have to keep a couple of things in mind;
-1. Use less than you think you need. Less than what you would use if you were using a normal shampoo. You are not going to get as rich of a lather with this soap. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t clean as well, and it doesn’t mean you didn’t use enough soap. A little known fact is that the ingredients that clean your hair in normal shampoos don’t lather either. Shampoo manufacturers ADD lathering agents purely for consumer impression. You get the impression as you are washing your hair that you are getting your hair really super clean because you are getting a nice thick rich lather, but in reality, the lather is not what is doing the cleaning, and to a small degree, lathering agents actually prevent detergent agents from working as well as they otherwise would. That’s why, in industrial cleaning supplies(not the ones you can find in walmart) they typically don’t add lathering agents. Normal shampoos have harsher detergent agents than this soap because of that effect, and because of the types of ingredients in normal conditioners(read on).

-2. Lather, rinse, THEN REPEAT. Shampoo twice, even if you are unaccustomed to doing that with normal shampoos.

-3. RINSE REALLY REALLY WELL. After you have rinsed your hair and the soap is all out of it; rinse it all over again.

-4. Don’t use a ‘normal’ conditioner, pick one without any heavy ‘cones’ in it. Most conditioners have ingredients whose last four letters end in c-o-n-e (like silicone, amodimethicone, cyclomethicone, etc.). Not all, but many, of these ingredients coat your hair and supposedly make it seem incredibly silky and shiny and beautiful and glorious and on and on (and cone leave-ins really give you this effect), but what they also do is keep the natural oils, from your scalp, and any other moisturizing products you may use, from actually getting into your hair, so you get on this cycle of stripping your hair with a normal shampoo, then coating your hair with a normal conditioner, then stripping then coating then stripping, etc., and your hair is getting drier and drier. Not all cones do this. There are lighter ones and ones that are water soluble that are not doing anything bad, and it’s up to you to use cones or not, but…IF YOU ARE USING THIS SOAP FOR SHAMPOO…then I would recommend staying away from it altogether. The harsh detergents in normal shampoos can handle stripping the normal conditioners from your hair with one washing, but this shampoo is much gentler and probably won’t. This is what I think people are doing wrong when they think this hair is drying their hair out. I don’t know, maybe they are worried it might, so they get what they think is going to be a really good conditioner, but it’s a ‘normal’ conditioner, and as a result they aren’t giving this soap an honest chance. They think it’s this shampoo, but it’s really their conditioner, that is causing their hair to be dry. There are a ton of really good conditioners that don’t have cones in them. Dr. Bronner’s makes a conditioner, but it’s pricey. The thing that makes this soap a great product is partly that it is almost immortal. (My last 16 ounce bottle of the peppermint lasted me 8 years. Admittedly, that was before I tried it as a shampoo, but that would’ve maybe shaved a couple years, at most, off of the…

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