Natural Dandruff Control

I have pretty bad dandruff. It's really itchy and irritating. I know my scalp is really sad and needs a lot of love, so I am (sadly) transitioning out of having super wacky cool hair colors and going back to my natural color. My hair-love plan basically consists of getting a hair cut and adopting some new methods for regular hair maintenance.

At the present moment, I shampoo my hair with castile soap, and condition with this store-bought conditioner from Grocery Outlet that smells really nasty like baby powder. The ingredients list has some amazing stuff in it though! Like horsetail! I mean, I've seriously never seen a commercial hair shampoo that has stuff like horsetail in it. But being real, considering I found it at Groc Out (pronounced: gross out), I'm a little skeptical that it has the ingredients it claims to have. I don't wash or condition often. Maybe once or twice a week at most. I still find that in the meantime my hair is super dry and brittle, so I'll give it a little massage with some avocado oil, concentrating on my frayed ends. Avo oil is great. It's pretty close to your body's natural oil, so it doesn't look goopy or oily or gross. For my hair, it's perfect considering my hair is already dry. It just moisturizes and protects and feels pretty great.

But this routine isn't working for me. I still have dandruff and an itchy scalp and my hair is still so brittle. My chief complaint is the dandruff though... so here's what I have planned:

• Continue to shampoo with castile soap
• Follow up with an apple cider vinegar (acv) rinse
• Note: vinegar cancels out castile soap. the soapy sudsies do their job in my hair, but many who use castile soap can attest to the weird residuey build up. if you wash your dishes with the stuff, you can surely see it, and if you wash your hair with it, you can feel the waxy residue it leaves. An ACV rinse serves two functions. First, it neutralizes the castile soap and removes the reside. And secondly, it serves as a mild anti-fungal medicine for the scalp.
• Condition with homemade conditioner (will post recipe later)
• Massage garlic-infused avocado and tea tree oil into scalp daily

I'm waiting to acquire a couple of ingredients before I can put together the conditioner, but as soon as I do, I'll make a post about it.

Something else I'm doing is trying to incorporate raw garlic into my diet daily... if not, then every other day. I mince a single clove into a small bowl and mix with raw honey and eat. Raw garlic is very hard to down but its incredibly good for you, and far better in its raw form than cooked. Cooked garlic still has some medicinal properties, for sure, but raw is best. I think that's pretty true for a lot of things. The honey helps- it's kind of a spicy-sweet sensation. It promotes heart health and is incredibly anti-microbial. 

**GARLIC-IS-GREAT-RANT*** 

So here's a cool factoid: the smell that garlic leaves you with is actually not just on your breath. The active constituents in garlic are actually absorbed into your blood, which is why you can still smell like garlic hours after you've consumed it. If you've ever used garlic as a vaginal suppository to treat yeast infections, you may have noticed that you can taste the garlic in your mouth even though its in a completely different part of your body. Again, that's because that wonderful smelly stuff is floating around in your blood and permeates your whole body doing so. Some plants have active constituents that really only serve as topical applications, like calendula. When a plant has constituents that enter the blood stream, it has more power to get around. Blood goes everywhere. Something like a calendula tea will only really benefit the cells it comes into contact with- which is great for cuts, scrapes, and even internally, for ulcers in the stomach and intestines. But somethings like garlic can get around. Most plant constituents that enter the bloodstream need a helper to get to the hard-to-reach places in your extremities, and in the lymph so you have to pair them with circulatory stimulants like cayenne. Garlic is a circulatory stimulant on it's own, which makes it an excellent and intelligent medicine. It's powerful and it has capacity to go anywhere. That's pretty cool.

TL;DR: My hope with incorporating garlic daily is manyfold... of course there are so many benefits that I don't care to list all here, but anti-fungal is a huge one as far as dandruff goes. This is why I'm incorporating a garlic-infused oil as a scalp massage into my regimen. I'm hoping that both internal (through the blood), and topical exposure to such a strong anti-fungal medicine will go a long way.