Eat Your Shampoo Vinegar!

July 23, 2026 Shannon Wiener

I have not used shampoo or conditioner in 4 years!

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Culinary Cosmetics: Why Your Hair Care Belongs in the Kitchen

Your scalp is like soil: it is alive and it likes to be fed! Would you water a houseplant with soapy water?! NO! You would use fresh clean water and fertilizer. The exact same rule goes for your hair. There are so many ways to fertilize our scalps, but first we want to stop damaging the microscopic organisms that live there.

Did you know the human body harbors more microbes than anywhere else on the planet, even the Amazon rainforest?! We are literally walking microbes. Those bugs know how to take care of our bodies, including our hair. You know how the gut microbiome is all the talk these days?! Well, your skin and scalp also have a biome that needs to be fed and protected.

🧬 Put the Bugs Back in Charge

Start with a water filter and replace your shampoo with something that the microbes actually like to eat, like the polyphenols that naturally occur in fruit vinegar! Then you can stack even more nutrients into your vinegar by blending things right from your own unique environment:

• Mango and Guava Leaves: Brilliant for deep scalp stimulation and active hair growth.
• Rosemary and Aloe Vera: Incredibly soothing, cooling, and hydrating for the skin.
• Holy Basil and Lavender: Perfect for balancing your natural sebum production.

Literally use whatever suits you! I bet if you walk out in your backyard right now, there are medicinal weeds and flowers that are great for hair growth. We just happen to have guava and mango trees in our backyard, which are both fantastic for hair, but so many plants are direct food for our hair.

I do not know that I would have believed you if you told me I did not need conditioner before this. Before quitting shampoo, I needed handfuls of conditioner just to get a brush through my hair after a shower. But now, my hair brushes easily and hardly ever gets oily because I focused entirely on creating a healthy environment for the biome. Those little microbes do all the work. They are billions of years old and know exactly what they are doing, so put them back in charge!

I stopped thinking that something outside of myself was the cure. Only my body knows what my body needs. Not even my mind knows! There is something deeply intelligent about the way the physical body just knows, and maaaaybe it is the bugs who are doing the thinking.

🥗 The Gut-Scalp Biome Axis

The biomes in our bodies are absolutely in communication, just like the mycelium networks in soil. If you focus on your gut health, you will see an improvement in all your other biomes too. Focus on the scalp, and your gut will follow. It is all interconnected, and that is exactly why eating your vinegar shampoo is so important!

But it is not just about the science. It tastes sooooooo freakin good! Did you know mango leaves actually taste like mango and have even more nutrients than the fruit itself? Our guts love that, not just our scalps.

This is why these vinegars are truly Culinary Cosmetics. When we started brewing vinegar, we did not intend to make hair products. It just happened naturally because everything on our bodies is interconnected. Vinegar is a direct product of fermentation, which means microbes make it! Because microbes make it, our bodies naturally want to consume it both internally and externally. The ancient people knew what was up. They used it in their hair and their food too.