sometime in third grade a nurse came to our school and did super quick checks of all of us for heads lice, and she checked the skin on our hands – i’m not sure what she was looking for, but she pulled me out of line because i had a little bit of a rash between two fingers. i forget all of the questions she asked but she ended up just telling me to use lotion regularly.

okay. whatever, my hands were always a little bit itchy off & on. i never really cared or thought much of it. my dad’s skin is allergic to absolutely everything. for the most part i could obsess over new body products all through my teen years and never feel like there was something super wrong.

fast forward to when they start making anti-bacterial soap and sanitizers and we buy some and the skin practically starts falling off my hands. aside from all the later-realized human / health / environmental reasons why those things are really really a bad idea, i stopped using them almost as soon as they arrived because they made my hands break out.

fine, no anti-bacterial stuff. easy enough. but then it was EVERYWHERE. it got to the point where i just stopped washing my hands with soap in public washrooms and other people’s homes unless i could tell exactly what it was. i would just run my hands under the hottest water i could stand. this seems to work fine – my whole life i’ve had one cold a year (if that) and one flue a year (if that – and i went nine years without a flu / without puking – i’m so jerry). i’ve never had strep throat or any other sickness other than a cold or flu. i’ve never had any kind of eye infection or any germ-transmitted problem, period. the only exception being my time at YSM – our office is right by the daycare (whose kids get water from our hallway often, using our doors) and we all worked in such close quarters that we were constantly, and i mean constantly, passing around some new strain of a cold or flu. i was there for exactly one year and had several different colds and at least three different stomach viruses. so did everyone else – someone was always sick. ironically, that was the only time i did wash my hands with cheap bulk antibacterial soap constantly, for exactly this reason.

mikey has a lot of these same problems. we’ve never used antibacterial handsoap (and he never gets sick, either) and always try to have “natural” liquid soap – unscented, whatever. he uses expensive “nautral” shampoo from lush. aveeno bodywash. he’s on a perpetual hunt for the best handcream for when his hands get so bad they just crack open and bleed (burt’s bees hand salve is a godsend and does not sting already-ruined hands). both of us still have rashes on our hands for at least 50% of the year. we are constantly switching things around. we use free & clear laundry detergent. it’s absolutely maddening. doctors can do nothing but give you cream to treat your immediate symptoms.

november 2007 was when i used the bodywash that gave me the really awful, missed-two-days-of-work-with-a-fever, all over rash. a couple of weeks ago (after battling a rash on my hands for weeks & finally deciding it was hazel’s totally ordinary j&j baby wash with a really high toxicity rating, so it turns out – ugh) i started using earth’s best, 70% organic baby wash/shampoo for her. way, way, way worse than before. my hands looked like they were covered in burns. i compared the ingredients on that to the ingredients on the Horrible November Bodywash (also “natural”) and came up with one thing in common: cocamidopropyl betaine. after making an emergency at-work phonecal to my chemist mama and consulting with some other rashy people / mothers of rashy kids and doing online research, i think that our years and years of rashiness (over 15 in my case) might be coming to an end. from what i understand CD is the “natural” alternative to other surfactants, namely sodium lauryl sulfate and sodium laureth sulfate – which are in pretty much every liquid soap and shampoo, among other things – like the compounds used to clean grease off of garage floors and other really harsh, industrial stuff. but we use it to wash our hair and our hands and our bodies and our babies because it makes foam, and people think they need foam to get clean. i always did. i never really considered shampoo as the culprit because nothing but my hands ever itch, so i’ve always used whatever i want, and whatever is best for my masses and masses of really thin, unmanageable hair. any time i have tried to use “natural” shampoo i have constant tangles.

this whole process of getting wet and then getting dry is just so annoying anyway – why have i spent all these years dousing myself with chemicals during an already annoying procedure? now that i’m a mom and having a long, hot shower is a total luxury and i can’t wait to take one, oh, every third day, it has become such a danger zone. i have friends who don’t use shampoo ever and they are totally clean. why can’t i just do this? some of them put baby powder in their hair to let it soak up the oil and then rinse it all off. it works perfectly fine. they smell fine. their hair looks beautiful. am i too much of a girl? did i spend too much time reading teen magazines? i just really love the smell of clean, panteen-ed hair.

after spending an hour in target reading labels and some time at the healthfood store this morning, here is the current surfactant-free team (some of this stuff we’ve already used for a long time):

- dr. bronner’s for handwashing and whatever else – it’s just plain liquid castile soap, easier for travel than a bar of soap. we’ve used this for awhile and it has made the cut. they sell it at target now, but pretty much every healthfood store i’ve ever been in has it.
- california baby shampoo / baby wash for hazel. never used this before – we’ll see how it goes. target has this, too.
- bars of plain, locally made soap for showering. no more liquid bodywash – bronner’s would be fine but this is cheaper. aveeno, you lose.
- prairie naturals shampoo – also new. probably the first surfactant-free shampoo i’ve ever used. mikey’s lush beer shampoo is out, we think – it has a synthetic surfactant that’s not one of the ones mentioned, so it might be ok. i also got a shampoo / conditioning bar soap to try. if it’s good for either of us we’ll start buying solid shampoo because it’s way cheaper than this $13 a bottle surfactant-free craziness. good thing it takes mikey at least six months to use a bottle of shampoo and i hardly ever shower anymore :)

i’ve also started using gloves to do dishes because even though we use 7th generation dishsoap, it has a synthetic surfactant. maybe when we move our new place will have a dishwasher? i can only dream…

if this doesn’t work out i don’t know what’s next. i don’t use lotion every single day – usually just burt’s salve on my hands and kiss my face cream on my face after a shower. i don’t even want to have to start looking into lotions, although as a general rule i don’t think anything in lotion is nearly as harsh as the detergents in liquid soaps.

hazel has only been exposed to a few kinds of soaps & lotions in her short little life, but nothing has ever bothered her skin at all. hopefully she did not get our bad-skin genes.

why couldn’t god have just designed us some self-cleaning bodies. what if we never had to wash our hair or put anything on our skin? what if no one ever dreamed up makeup? we obsess over “clean” bottled water and then slather ourselves in chemicals every day.

i really really just want to join the no-hair-washing club. i really do.

kudos if you read all of that. here’s a picture as a prize. reason #23743274839 to move home: built-in like minded mamas: