Picture this: you’re running twenty minutes late to pick up your friends. You just finished your makeup and you take your hair out of its bun to shake it out, so it sits down nicely, and you may as well be mother nature–as what looks like snowfalls into your sink from your scalp. You cover your white speckled roots with a hat.
That was my reality for years. I had tried everything on the market, from coal tar shampoos, head and shoulders, tea tree, straight up oil, and apple cider vinegar.
It was embarrassing. TV conditioned you into believing that dandruff was weird, not normal, and kids struggling with their scalps were the butt of jokes. You get scared for crushes to come too close, and can’t ask your friends to braid your hair like everyone else’s so they don’t see it. If you’re like me, you cried about it many times.
Luckily, there are tons of treatments for dandruff. There are home remedies, pharmaceuticals, and many other treatments. Dermatologists can prescribe a multitude of active ingredients to get it treated, but if you’re like me and overthink everything, you may find an unrelated problem.
My scalp felt sunburnt every time I washed it, it ached and peeled into chunks of dead skin. I stopped washing it completely. Finally, though there was too much product buildup, it needed to be washed.
Instead of the normal anti-dandruff shampoos, I kept picking up from the drugstore, I instead opted for a sulfate-free, no lather, incredibly gentle oil-based shampoo I had bought when I was trying the Curly Girl Method.
My scalp didn’t hurt at all. In fact, months into using it as my regular shampoo and following it with aloe vera on my scalp, not only is there no pain, but my dandruff is gone. Not a single flake.
How can this happen? When I really thought about it, something similar happened about once a month. I would have to stop using my mouthwash due to an open cut into my mouth, making it too painful to use. After a week of not using it, the sore would hear, and I would start again. It seemed as if my mouthwash was causing the problem, creating open sores in my mouth.
The ingredient in my mouthwash that caused it is Sodium Lauryl Sulfate (SLS) and is also found as the second ingredient in most shampoos. It’s also a very common allergy and sensitivity.
All of a sudden, by sifting sulfates out of my bath products, the conditions that were plaguing me had disappeared in a matter of 30 days. My curls are looking better than ever and my new mouthwash leaves me a lot fresher.