This a is topic much on our minds of late. As you may know from previous posts we are currently making up our new Tengu catalog and one of the toughest products to choose seems to be shampoo. It’s a product most of us use at least every couple of days if not every day and it can make a huge difference to how we feel about our appearance. If, like me, you are cursed with wavy hair the rainy season and hot muggy summers bring out frizz in force and there is very little I can do to control it. Other Japanese staff members suffer from thick hair which tends to stick out in all directions if not controlled properly. It can take a lot of courage to try a new shampoo for fear it will make the frizz worse or cause your hair to dry out or even worse, fall out. However, the chemicals which most mainstream shampoos contain to combat these problems are often detrimental to the health of your hair, scalp and in some cases health in general. I’m sure you’ve read all about SLS (sodium laurel sulfate) and what risks it can pose to your health. The American site Skin Deep has a wealth of information on personal care products and their ingredients if you’d like to find out more. Here at Tengu we always search for products that we feel will benefit your health or aid a healthy lifestyle but when faced with the majority of shampoos, even those with organic certification, there are precious few we feel we could recommend. If it smells good, lathers well and rinses out to leave soft hair it’s usually got something in it you’d be better off avoiding!

All is not lost however as soap is a super-safe method of cleaning your hair. The biggest problem with soap is most people tend to try it once, end up with coarse, tangly hair and give up. It’s true, it will never give you quite the same smooth, silky hair as certain mainstream shampoos, but you can do a lot to help. Firstly soap is very alkaline and you must use a rinse with something acidic. A solution of 3:1 water to vinegar will work (and once your hair dries, the smell disappears, I promise) as will a 10:1 solution of water to citric acid (クエン酸 – very popular in Japan at the moment). You can also add essential oils. Lavender is great to sooth an itchy scalp in the summer and rosemary will help condition your hair. I actually use our Traditional Medicinals Lavender and Chamomile tea in a water/vinegar solution. Easy, and safe for children too. Given the choice between vinegar and citric acid I’d go for vinegar as it stings less if you happen to get it in your eyes – this is especially true if you’re washing your children’s hair! Secondly give your hair an oil treatment every once in a while. This can be as simple as rubbing warmed olive or sunflower oil into your scalp, leaving for ten minutes with a towel wrapped round your head, then shampooing well. Alternatively you could add herbs to the oil such as rosemary and chamomile, leaving them to steep for a week or so, then using this as a hair pack. There are some excellent organic oil based treatments around Japan too, though they tend to be rather expensive.

Our current catalog can offer you Dr.Bronners castile soap, from which I can highly recommend the peppermint to combat the summer heat, if you’d like to try out a soap shampoo for yourself. We also have various kinds of vinegar including white vinegar, apple cider vinegar and rice vinegar, any of which would work well in a rinse. We sell a wide variety of herbal teas too which you could use as a hair rinse. For our next catalog we hope to have at least one new line of shampoos to offer you alongside Aubrey Organics which produces some of the safest products in the business. Lets hope we can find something worthy of our catalog by the time it goes to press! Happy Shampooing!