I Tried It: Raw Cacao Powder Dry Shampoo
After switching from store-bought deodorant to a simple homemade deodorant with awesome results, I decided I would green-ify my dry shampoo next. I’m relatively new to the addictive world of dry shampoos, as I normally just wash my hair when it starts feeling oily. This used to be every other day when I was using drugstore brands, but is now every 4-5 days with my beloved Rahua Classic Shampoo (plus Rahua Classic Conditioner when my hair feels dry). But after seeing a few people on Instagram talk about the magic of going 6-7 days between washes, I wondered if I too could stretch my mere 4-5 days (lol) into a glorious full week sans shampoo.
First I tried bentonite clay (it left a very obvious dusty white cast on my dark roots), then my RMS Un Powder (surprisingly decent but expensive), and then the food-grade ingredient that’s supposed to be perfect for dark hair like mine: raw cacao powder (cocoa powder would be similar). I always have cacao powder on hand, it’s inexpensive, obviously non-toxic, and I would smell like chocolate. Wins all around…right?!
Nope. My results were AWFUL. I know people swear by cacao powder as dry shampoo, but for me, it made a huge mess of my bathroom counter and floor no matter how carefully I applied it (via small sifter or fluffy foundation brush). Also:
- It stained my scalp in a weird and obvious way.
- It tinted my dark hair slightly red?
- I always managed to dust it all over my face. (Some people use cacao powder as bronzer, but that wasn’t what I had in mind.)
- It made me perpetually smell like hot chocolate (the novelty of that wore off very fast).
- I had to put a towel over my white pillowcase at night to prevent stains.
- I needed to double shampoo my hair to get it to completely rinse out on day 7.
In the end, I did gain 2 more days between washes, but those 2 days were 100% not worth it.
Afterwards, I was so disappointed in my little cacao powder experiment that I caved at Sephora and bought a dry shampoo spray for brunettes from Moroccan Oil, which worked great minus the horrible ingredients and artificial fragrance. (I came to my senses and tossed it in the trash shortly after, with $16 less in my bank account.)
Currently, I almost never use dry shampoo because if I feel like I need to wash my hair, then I wash my damn hair. Simple as that.
All of that said, if you can’t live without dry shampoo in your life and you want to be more mindful of the ingredients, I did actually get really good results sprinkling a little of my RMS Un Powder directly on my roots and massaging it in. It’s a very fine silica powder that’s oil-absorbing and so long as I’m light-handed, it doesn’t leave a white residue, even on my dark brown hair.
P.S. You can find my previous “I Tried It” posts here.
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