Shampoo

The amount of shampoo you use is a very personal thing. Some people like to have a very balanced amount so that there aren’t suds all over the place, just enough to get the hair washed. Others relish the idea of making it through the year on one bottle of shampoo, so they use as little as possible, lathering it for a long time in order to get the most out of every drop. Then there are some who squeeze out a giant glob of it because they have to have enough to make a huge fauxhawk with the sudsy hair. (There also might be a few who are totally indifferent about the amount of shampoo, beware of these people, they probably don’t even wash their hair.)

Now, let me be clear, I’m not saying that everyone stands there in the shower and thinks about how much shampoo they need. No, that wouldn’t work; it’s too hard to think about that kind of thing when you’re singing Glee songs into your pretend fist microphone. What I’m saying is that everyone has a trigger in their mind that goes off after they’ve squeezed a certain amount of shampoo. At some point, your mind says, “Okay, Rockstar, that’s enough shampoo.”  For some people this trigger just goes off sooner than for others.

One of the reasons it’s such a personal habit is that, usually, no one else is around when you wash your hair; so there’s no “social conditioning” (pun intended) that tells you how much to use. (Until you get married, that is, at which point your spouse will inform you whether you use too much or too little shampoo.)

I usually use too much shampoo, but not so much that I feel wasteful. Today, however, I used WAY WAY TOO MUCH shampoo. You see, today I got my hair cut (thanks Candice!), and when I squeezed out the shampoo, the trigger in my head hadn’t adjusted to the new, greatly reduced, amount of fro atop my melon. So before I even realized what had happened, it was too late; I mean, you can’t really put it back IN the bottle, can you?

The cool thing about this whole fiasco was that I realized how much fun it was to use way too much shampoo. I had a tower of suds on top of my head that rivaled Marge Simpson. It was pretty awesome, and, in the end, I think the trigger in my head may have moved back a little so that, from now on, there might be a little more awesome and a few more fauxhawks in the hair washing department.