Dry Shampoo and Can We Use It?

By Choya Randolph

Have you ever heard of dry shampoo? If you’re a lazy natural like me, it sounds perfect. All you do is spray your hair with a dry shampoo, wait 30 seconds, massage it in with your fingers, then BOOM, now your scalp is clean. My white friends use it all the time when they don’t feel like washing their hair. I just assumed it was something not meant for my hair texture but times have gotten hard and I have gotten lazy. So I thought “Lemme see if I can make this work for me because I too don’t feel like washing my hair.”

After a little bit of research, I’ve learned that if you have type 3 or type 4 hair, dry shampoo is not for you. It may not even work well for my girls with wavy hair. Dry shampoo uses starch-based ingredients and alcohol to remove oils from the hair and make it look cleaner. It doesn’t even really clean the scalp. I should’ve known, it is called DRY shampoo and nothing with the word “dry” in it should be put in my kinky hair.

There are many differences between straight hair and kinky hair. Of course there’s the visual differences but straight hair gets oily faster than curly hair. That’s why my girls with straight hair wash their hair almost everyday. If us coily girls did that, our hair will be drier than some of yall’s elbows. Our natural hair oils struggle to coat our kinky hair which is why a lot of what we do as naturals is to keep our hair hydrated. A dry shampoo just ain’t it for us.

But I’m a true lazy natural. I’d rather work hard to research ways to be lazier with my hair care routine than just take the L and keep it moving. After doing more research, dry shampoo can irritate the scalp and dry out the hair which causes the hair follicles to weaken. This leads to breakage and hair thinning. Dry shampoo can also make your hair look like flour is coming out of your roots. At this point, I don’t even know why people with oily hair use it. 

So where does that leave me? Left with a bunch of information on a product that wasn’t even meant for my hair texture? The best us lazy naturals can do for the times we don’t feel like going through an entire wash day is a cowash. Cowashing is when you use a cleansing conditioner to wash your hair instead of a shampoo. Not only does this clean the scalp, it conditions our hair. It could work for my girls with straight hair too, if you make your own. It’s not as easy as simply spraying a dry shampoo but sometimes we just can’t be lazy with our hair. So next time you feel like skipping wash day, skip over that dry shampoo and grab a cowash.