Based Supplies ad: I Washed My Hair With Dish Soap for 31 Years

For thirty-one years I washed my hair with the same thing I wash my lasagna pans with. I found out on a Sunday night in March because we ran out of Dawn. I am not exaggerating that for effect. I'm going to tell you exactly what happened in my kitchen that night, and at some point in this story I'm going to ask you to go get your shampoo bottle. Because I think you might be doing it too. My name is Denise. I'm 47. I live in Grove City, Ohio, with my husband Greg, our son Caleb, who is sixteen and eats like a linebacker, and a cat named Pickles who belongs to nobody and everybody. Our daughter Abby is a junior at Ohio State. She's going to matter a lot in about four paragraphs. I've managed the front office of a dental practice for fourteen years. I'm the person who answers the phone, fights with insurance companies, and remembers which patients need a blanket in the chair. I'm good at noticing small things. That's my whole job. I did not notice this one for a long time. I've always had thick hair. Not fancy hair, just a lot of it. Brown, heavy, the kind that takes forty minutes to blow dry and breaks hair ties. My mom used to say I had "horse hair," which I took as a compliment. Around 44, the hair ties stopped breaking. That was the first thing. I used to wrap a hair tie twice around my ponytail and it would strain. Then it was two and a half times. Then three. I remember standing at the bathroom sink one morning, wrapping it a third time, and thinking: huh. That's new. Then it was the drain. I'd pull out a clump after every shower, wad it up in toilet paper, and throw it away before Greg could see it. Then it was the TV. Our office put new LED ceiling panels in the operatories in the summer of 2024. Very bright, very white. There's a TV mounted on the ceiling above each dental chair so patients can watch HGTV while they get their teeth cleaned. One afternoon I was leaning over the chair in room two to adjust the remote, and the TV was off, and I saw the top of my own head reflected in that black screen under those new lights. I could see my scalp. Not a little. A pale strip down the middle, spreading out at the crown like a river delta. I stood there holding the remote for so long that Marcy, our hygienist, asked me if I was okay. I said I was fine. I went into the supply closet and cried for about two minutes and then I went back to the front desk and answered the phone like nothing happened. That was August. By October I had spent more money on my hair than I had spent on myself in the previous five years combined. I know you know this list, because I've since found out every woman in my situation buys the same things in about the same order. But I'm going to write mine down, because I added it all up on the back of an envelope later and I want you to see the number. Nutrafol. $88 a month. I was on it for seven months. $616. Biotin, 10,000 mcg, three bottles. $57. Viviscal, two boxes. $99.98. A collagen powder that I stirred into my coffee every morning and that made my coffee taste like wet cardboard. $42. Rosemary oil, which I rubbed into my scalp at night and which made my pillowcase smell like a pot roast. $14. A red light therapy cap off Amazon that I wore while watching Jeopardy, looking like an extra from a science fiction movie. $189. And the big one. A "clinically proven" thinning hair system in a blue bottle. Shampoo, conditioner, and a little "activating" serum. $64 a kit. I went through four kits. $256. Total: $1,273.98. I'm a dental office manager. I know what $1,273.98 is. That's a crown. That's a crown I paid for and didn't get. None of it worked. I don't mean it worked a little. I mean that by Christmas the part was wider than it had been in August, and Greg's mother asked me, very kindly, while we were doing dishes, if I was "eating enough." I went to my family doctor in January. She ran bloodwork. Thyroid normal. Iron a little low, so she told me to take an iron supplement. Hormones "consistent with perimenopause." She looked at my scalp for maybe fifteen seconds and said, "It's probably hormonal. It's really common at your age. You could try Rogaine." I said I'd think about it. I sat in the parking lot afterward and thought: so this is just what happens now. This is who I am now. The woman with the delta. Now. The lasagna. The second Sunday in March was Caleb's birthday dinner. He requested my lasagna, which is the only thing I make that he will say thank you for without being reminded. I make it in a big glass Pyrex dish and I always, always let the cheese bake onto the edges because that's the part everybody fights over. After dinner, the dish was a disaster. Baked-on cheese, burnt sauce around every edge. I went to fill the sink and the Dawn bottle was empty. Totally empty. Greg had used the last of it on the grill grates and put the bottle back under the sink, because that's what Greg does. It was 8:40 on a Sunday night. The Kroger by us closes at nine on Sundays. I wasn't going. So I stood there, and I'm going to be honest about my thought process, because it's ridiculous. I thought: what's the most expensive soap in this house? And the answer was my shampoo. The blue bottle. Sixty-four dollars a kit. I remember thinking, if it's going to cost me that much, it can at least clean a pan. I went upstairs, got it out of the shower, came back down, and squirted a big glob of it into the hot water. It foamed up like a bubble bath. Way more than I expected. And then I took the sponge to the edge of that Pyrex dish, the baked-on cheese part, and it came off. Not with scrubbing. It just lifted. The grease slid right off the glass the same way it does with Dawn. Maybe better. I stood there with suds up to my elbows looking at that pan. I took a picture of the shampoo bottle sitting on the edge of my sink, next to the empty Dawn, and I texted it to Abby with the message: "Is it weird that my hair shampoo just cleaned the lasagna pan better than the dish soap?" She called me four minutes later. She didn't say hi. She said: "Mom. Read me the back of the bottle." Abby is a chemistry major. She's the kid who used to mix my lotions together in the bathroom to "see what happens." She took organic chemistry last year and called home twice a week to complain about it. She's not a doctor. She's not a scientist yet. She's twenty. But she knows what molecules do, and she was very calm on the phone in a way that made me nervous. I turned the bottle around. I read: "Water. Sodium Laureth Sulfate. Sodium Lauryl Sulfate." She said: "Okay. Now go get the Dawn bottle out of the recycling." I did. I put my wet hands on the empty Dawn bottle and turned it around and I read: "Water. Sodium Laureth Sulfate." Same second ingredient. My sixty-four-dollar hair-saving shampoo and the dish soap had the same second ingredient. There was a long pause on the phone. Then Abby said: "Mom, how long have you been using that shampoo?" "The blue one? Since September." "No. How long have you been washing your hair every single day with shampoo that has sulfates in it?" I thought about it. "Since I was sixteen?" "Okay," she said. "Can I come home Saturday? I want to explain this to you in person, with paper. I don't want to do it on the phone." That was a very long week. Abby came home on Saturday with her laundry and a spiral notebook. We sat at the kitchen table. Greg pretended to watch basketball in the next room and listened to every word. Here is what she explained to me. I'm going to put it the way she put it, because she put it in a way that made sense to a dental office manager. The ingredient I read off both bottles is a surfactant. A sulfate. Abby said a surfactant has one job: it grabs onto oils and grease and pulls them off whatever it's touching so the water can rinse them away. That's it. That's what makes foam. That's why it's in dish soap. She said the reason Dawn is famous for cleaning oil off ducks after oil spills is that surfactant. It is very, very good at stripping. "Which is great for a pan," she said. "And great for a duck, once. Now think about your head." Then she drew me a picture of a hair. Your hair, she said, is made of a protein called keratin. And keratin is strong because it's held together by bonds made of sulfur. Disulfide bonds. She said this is actually why burning hair smells so bad, because of all the sulfur in it. Your hair is basically a sulfur protein. Your scalp makes its own sulfur and your follicles use it as the raw material to build that keratin. That's how new hair grows in and how existing hair stays thick. "And the sulfate," she said, "strips it. That's literally what it's built to do. It doesn't know the difference between grease on a pan and the stuff your scalp needs." She said if you wash with it once in a while, your body catches up. Your scalp replaces what got stripped in a few days and nothing bad happens. "But you've done it every single morning for thirty-one years," she said. "And then when your hair started thinning, you went out and bought a shampoo for thinning hair that is the same detergent with a different label. You've been stripping it faster and faster, and then trying to pour stuff back in from the other end." That's when she turned to a clean page and drew the sink. A bathroom sink. A faucet at the top. A drain at the bottom. She drew arrows. Next to the faucet she wrote "biotin, collagen." Next to the bowl she wrote "your scalp." Next to the drain she wrote "sulfate shampoo." "Every pill you took is the faucet," she said. "Nutrafol, the biotin, the collagen, all of it. You turned the faucet on full blast. But the drain is wide open, every morning, in the shower. The sink never fills. You can't out-pill a drain, Mom." She underlined that last line twice and tore out the page and stuck it on our fridge with a magnet shaped like a tooth. It's still there. I'm going to tell you how I felt, because I think it matters. I didn't feel stupid. I thought I would. What I actually felt was this enormous wave of relief, and then, about ten seconds later, I was furious. For eighteen months I had been quietly blaming myself. My age. My hormones. Stress at work. Not drinking enough water. Something I was eating, or not eating. Greg's mother's comment. My doctor's fifteen-second look. Everybody, including me, had decided the problem was my body. And the whole time, the problem was sitting on the shelf in my shower, and I was paying sixty-four dollars a kit for it. Abby said something that night I keep coming back to. She said: "You didn't do anything wrong, Mom. You did exactly what the commercials told you to do. Lather, rinse, repeat. They told you foam means clean. Foam is the stuff that cleaned the lasagna pan." I asked her what I was supposed to use instead. She had already thought about this, because she's Abby. She said two things, and the order matters. First: stop stripping. Get anything with Sodium Lauryl Sulfate or Sodium Laureth Sulfate out of the shower. That's step one, and nothing else works until it's done. Close the drain. Second: feed the follicles, and do it on the scalp, not in your stomach. She said everything I'd been swallowing has to go through my whole digestive system first and gets split up between my skin and my nails and my liver and everything else. By the time any of it gets to a follicle on top of my head, it's a rounding error. If the problem is on your scalp, put the fix on your scalp. She'd spent part of the week reading studies on Google Scholar, because that's how she procrastinates on her actual homework. She showed me a few on her laptop. There's a study in the Journal of Dermatology on onion extract applied to the scalp. Onions are full of sulfur, she said, which is the whole point. Most of the people in the study had visible regrowth within weeks. There's a study where rosemary oil, applied to the scalp, did about as well as minoxidil over six months, without the itching. Nettle is a plant that's been looked at for DHT, which is the hormone that shrinks follicles as we get older. Peppermint oil gets the blood moving in the scalp. "So you want sulfur and circulation on your scalp," she said, "in something that doesn't strip it right back off." Then she warned me about something, and I'm so glad she did. She said, "You're going to go on Amazon and see a hundred onion shampoos. Read the back of every single one. Most of them are the same sulfate shampoo with a picture of an onion on the front." She was right. I spent two nights on it after she went back to school. I read the back of every onion shampoo on the first three pages of Amazon, zooming in on the ingredient photos. Almost all of them had Sodium Laureth Sulfate in the first few ingredients. A lot of them didn't say how much onion was in there at all. When they did, it was tiny. A fraction of a percent. The onion was there for the front of the bottle. I found one that was different. It's made by a small family business, not one of the big companies. And the very first ingredient on the list is 15% concentrated onion hydrosol. Fifteen percent. Not a sprinkle for the label. Fifteen percent of the bottle. Then rosemary oil. Peppermint oil. Nettle extract. Biotin, right there in the shampoo, on the scalp where Abby said it should go. Aloe vera juice. Hydrolyzed vegetable protein to strengthen the hair. Glycerin. No sulfates. No parabens. No silicones. There's a matching conditioner with onion hydrosol, castor oil, argan oil, pumpkin seed oil, a little lavender oil, biotin and panthenol. I sent Abby a screenshot of both ingredient lists. She texted back: "That's basically what I'd make if I could make shampoo." Then: "Buy both. And stop buying the pills." I ordered them on a Tuesday night. They came the following Monday. I was nervous about one thing, and I bet you are too. I was scared it was going to smell like onions. I work at a front desk. I lean over people all day. I was not going to walk around smelling like a sub shop. So the first thing I did when the box came was stand in the bathroom and open the shampoo and smell it, braced for the worst. It smelled like a spa. Herbal. Clean. A little minty from the peppermint. No onion at all. I found out later that they ferment the onion and extract it cold, and that process gets rid of the smell. All I know is I smelled it about four times because I didn't believe my own nose. A couple of days later Caleb came out of the upstairs bathroom and said, "Why does it smell like a hotel in there?" That's a five-star review from a sixteen-year-old boy. Here's what happened. I'm going to give it to you straight, the way I wish someone had given it to me, because I'd been burned so many times I didn't trust anything. Week one. The first thing I noticed wasn't my hair at all. It was my scalp. It didn't feel tight after the shower. It didn't itch by lunchtime. It felt calm. I hadn't even realized my scalp felt angry until it stopped. The lather was a lot lighter than I was used to. My first three showers I kept pumping more into my hand trying to get the big foam. Then I heard Abby in my head: foam is the stuff that cleaned the lasagna pan. I stopped. Week two. Less hair in the drain. Not none. Less. I'd started counting, because of course I had. I used to pull out somewhere around fifty strands after a wash. By the end of week two it was closer to thirty. Week three. The hair tie. I went to wrap it the third time and it was tight. I stood there with my hands behind my head like a statue. Week five. Baby hairs. Short, fine little hairs along my part and around my crown, standing straight up like they hadn't figured out which way to lie yet. I found them in the mirror at 6:15 in the morning and I yelled for Greg so loud he came running up the stairs thinking I'd fallen. He looked. He said, "Huh. Yeah. Those are new." Greg is not a man who overstates things. Coming from him, that's a speech. Week eight. Marcy, the hygienist, the one who asked me if I was okay in room two, stopped me in the break room and asked if I'd gotten extensions. I said no. She said, "Then what did you do? Your hair looks so full." I told her about the lasagna pan. She went home that night and checked her shampoo. Sodium Laureth Sulfate. Second ingredient. Week twelve. I stood in room two under those same LED lights, leaned over the same chair, and looked up at the same black TV screen. The delta was gone. It's a part again. A line. I'm not going to tell you my hair is what it was at twenty-five. I'm 47. It isn't, and I don't think it's going to be. And I'm not going to promise you your hair will do exactly what mine did on exactly my schedule. Everybody's different. What I can tell you is that it's thicker and fuller than it's been in three years, the hair tie is back to two wraps, and I can stand under bright lights at work without tilting my head. The only thing I changed was the shampoo and conditioner. I stopped the Nutrafol. That's $88 a month I'm not spending. I stopped the biotin, the collagen, the Viviscal. I gave the red light cap to my sister-in-law, who uses it as a Halloween costume. The rosemary oil is in my kitchen now, where it belongs, on potatoes. The blue bottle went in the trash. Well, that's not true. I keep it under the kitchen sink. If we ever run out of Dawn again, I know exactly what will clean the lasagna pan. If any of this sounds like you, I want to ask you to do one thing tonight. You don't have to buy anything. Go into your bathroom. Pick up your shampoo. Turn it around and read the second ingredient. If it says Sodium Lauryl Sulfate or Sodium Laureth Sulfate, go to your kitchen and read the back of your dish soap. And if you still don't believe me, do my test. The next time you have a greasy pan, wash it with your shampoo. Watch what it does to the grease. Then think about the fact that you put it on your scalp every morning. That's what you're doing to the thing your follicles need. Every single wash. You can't out-pill a drain. You have to close it first. Then you feed what's starving. The shampoo and conditioner I use are made by that small family business. 15% concentrated onion hydrosol, rosemary, peppermint, nettle, biotin, aloe. No sulfates, no parabens, no silicones. It smells like a spa, not a sandwich. And they come with a 30-day money-back guarantee. If you try them and you don't love how your hair looks and feels, you get your money back. I want to say why that matters to me. Out of my $1,273.98, I got back exactly zero dollars. The Nutrafol auto-renewed. The biotin was opened. The blue bottle kits were "final sale." Every single one of those purchases left the risk with me. This is the only thing I bought in eighteen months where the risk was on them. I wish my lasagna pan had gotten stuck eighteen months sooner. Denise P.S. Abby's drawing of the sink is still on our fridge. Greg's mother saw it at Easter and asked what it was. I told her the whole story at the kitchen table. She went upstairs, came back down with her own shampoo bottle, read the second ingredient out loud, and didn't say anything for a while. She's using mine now too. She has not asked me if I'm eating enough since. P.P.S. About the smell, one more time, because I know some of you scrolled back up to check. It does not smell like onions. It smells clean and herbal and a little minty. Caleb said hotel. Marcy said spa. Not one patient in three months has leaned back in that chair and asked me why I smell like onion rings. I promise.