Many people write to me and tell me that they believe that washing your hair causes hair loss or thinning. Many find that they have more shedding or loss when they wash their hair, so over time they decide to try washing less or not at all to see if this helps the situation. And it’s pretty easy to find articles that tell you that you can clean your scalp without shampooing and that the chemicals in these products are very irritating. Still, even with this information, I get people who will write to me and tell me that they are concerned about too much DHT if they don’t wash their scalp and hair. In the next article, I will discuss hair washing and the DHT connection and offer tips on how to best handle this.

Can you really have a healthy scalp, clean hair, and less hair loss if you don’t wash your hair ?: The short answer to this, in my opinion, is no. It is true that if you give up washing, you may see less shedding at first. But, eventually, everything will balance out. Hair that comes out during washing is dead hair that was going to come out at some point in the near future anyway. The act of washing only massages the follicles and makes the inevitable happen a little faster. But in truth, the sooner dead hair comes out, the sooner you can replace it with hair that will grow out and offer you longer-term coverage.

And often, skipping the necessary wash will make your hair look heavy, oily, and thin. You will not get a good cosmetic result if you skip this step too much. Dirty hair is heavy and it will look like you have less.

I realize there are groups of people who only wash with conditioner (called “COing” or “conditioner only” or “no poop”. This is mostly for people with curly hair). Water or vinegar and water and work the scalp with your fingertips. But I know from experience that it is difficult to remove all sebum, DHT, environmental pollution, and natural oils without some type of product. Now this can certainly be a natural and gentle product and I am not advocating drying out the scalp and depleting it of its natural, protective oils with an excess of shampoo.

But you can never get rid of your excess DHT (and also your sensitivity to what you produce on a daily basis) with just shampoo. Often times, you will need to add more to your regimen to really get this under control. But washing is a very important part of keeping the scalp and follicles free of obstructions and suffocating debris. Once your follicle becomes clogged, it adds another hair loss problem that you need to address. And this will often hasten your leak worse than the toilet did. I realize that seeing the fallout that occurs when you wash your hair can be difficult, but it is best that you experiment with gentle, chemical-free products applied very gently but regularly.

And an even better idea than that is to tackle the underlying cause of hair loss and treat it because once you can do it, shampooing is most likely no longer the trauma it is now. So the short answer is that if you skip this important step, you will surely have higher levels of potentially harmful DHT on your scalp than you would have if you washed regularly.