As expected,his hair became increasingly rank. Day by day the situation worsened,until,well,it stopped worsening. The scalp,sensing an excess of oil,stopped producing more. A few weeks in and his hair was cleaner,lighter,shinier than it had been during his days as a shampoo user.
As a child,I was sent to a Presbyterian Sunday school,somewhere deep in the Amish part of Sydney's North Shore. While the church officials never managed to convince me of the existence of God,they really sold me on the idea of delayed gratification. Somewhere deep inside my psyche this idea remains:the sweetest pleasure is the one that involves first enduring some pain.
It has proved a useful notion when it comes to university study,credit control and getting on top of the housework. It was also,I assume,why Parris'"no-shampoo"campaign chimed with me. If only one were willing to endure six weeks of oily agony,one could enter a sunny uplands of perpetual bliss. It was the whole Protestant philosophical mindset rendered as hair care.
I decided I would make myself a guinea pig. On radio,I idly suggested others may care to join me. In the end,523 listeners signed up to the deal:we agreed not to use shampoo for six weeks,recording in a dairy the impact on our hair. At the end of the process,we would assess whether our hair was better,worse or the same.
The Sydney experiment was widely reported. I found myself quoted in theNew York Times. A Dutch radio program set up its own experiment. In London,Parris noted that he'd become patron saint of a world-wide movement,and wondered whether he'd finally managed his life-long ambition of creating a cult in his own name.
Many quoted the central thesis of the Sydney experiment:shampoo is just a detergent designed to strip the oil from your scalp,which in turn encourages your scalp to pump out more oil to replace what has been lost. Hold off with the detergent and your scalp will find its own natural balance.
By now,assuming that you are a shampoo user,I have the sense that you are gasping with revulsion – perhaps even registering delight that I am communicating with you via the written word,rather than in person.