Conditioning before shampooing, all the cool kids are doing it – but would you? We tried the reverse washing trend for a fortnight to find out whether it really does work wonders.

Me and my hair don’t get along. It never sits right, it never looks right. If my hair was another human being I would actively avoid being in their presence.

I’d heard of the reverse washing trend on the beauty grapevine, with claims it would give my hair volume and the tousled texture that I so desperately covet.

We asked over on Twitter whether or not you’re on board with reverse washing. The results were pretty divided, with only 10% more of you saying that you wouldn’t be up to giving it a go.

So, I made the decision to run a little experiment with my showering routine. For two weeks (seven washes), I used conditioner before my shampoo to see if it made any difference at all.

Wash One

Okay, this felt weird. When I applied the conditioner to my hair my brain did an automatic thing and before I knew it my hands were massaging the conditioner into my scalp, in exactly the same way that you lather up shampoo. Upon getting out of the shower, it was strange that I didn’t feel that familiar silky smoothness of just conditioned hair, what I did feel was quite the opposite, my hair felt tangled and rough. I was just dying to tame my mane with my Tangle Teezer.

As you can see in the below image, my hair didn’t look great after it’s first reverse wash. My ends look frizzier than usual and I’m sending off some serious Hermione Granger vibes. Wash one was over, and I wasn’t convinced.

Wash 2

After a pretty disappointing first wash, I started to not expect great things from this whole ‘conditioning before shampooing’ thing. By the time that I’d dried my hair following the second reverse wash, though, my views on the routine changed slightly. My hair didn’t feel matted like before, this time it felt matte.

I often use mattifying hair powders to get my locks looking a little dishevelled and to get things on just the right side of ‘dragged through a hedge backwards’. However, after my second reverse wash, I didn’t feel the need to matte-up my hair any more. The shine-free finish was right up my street. I felt that my hair had been enriched enough by the conditioner to keep it healthy, and the only thing I was missing out on was that signature ‘just been conditioned’ hair shine that I wasn’t too fond of anyway. Plus, look how much better the ends of my hair look in this photo! Maybe I was on to something good with this.

Wash 3

Time for yet another backwards hair rinse, and by this point I was becoming fond of my new routine. My ‘second day hair’ didn’t resemble an oil slick, and I felt that my hair naturally had a lot more hold than usual. The can of hairspray in my bathroom cabinet was certainly seeing a lot less action. Although my hair wasn’t getting the long-lasting sheen and moisture of conditioner that it was used to, it still felt hydrated and it wasn’t at all dry. I really love the messy look, and I found that kind of style was much easier to achieve after adapting the reverse washing thing into my life.

Wash 4

By the time that my fourth wash came around, I was noticing something peculiar. I wash my hair every other day, so during this experiment I was able to experience how freshly washed hair and second day hair reacted to reverse washing. Up until wash four (the eighth day of my new routine), my hair was acting pretty normal, only it could hold volume naturally and I wasn’t needing to use as much hairspray or texturising powder. All of a sudden, though, I noticed that my hair was becoming unusually greasy. This wasn’t just in a normal ‘second day hair’ kind of way, either. By around 5pm on the day that I’d washed my hair, it felt as greasy and as unclean as it usually did if I went without rinsing it for about three days. But in the name of hair science, I persevered.

Wash 5

Annoyingly, the greasy thing continued. My hair would look (and feel) great for the first few hours after washing, but by the evening it felt flat, oddly heavy and really quite unclean. I was beginning to think that maybe reverse washing worked best as a short term boost for texturised hair, and that the long-term effects were a tad more undesirable. Where had that volume gone?!

Wash 6

By this point, I was dying to give my hair a ‘proper’ wash. By conditioning first, I didn’t feel like all the grease and grime that had built up was really being removed properly from my hair, and by the time that I used shampoo, all the shampoo did was wash away the conditioner that I’d just applied – leaving all the gross stuff in my hair. I was eager to get my hands on a clarifying shampoo, and I really missed the feeling of squeaky clean hair. Weirdly enough, however, my hair was looking a lot healthier than it did before I started the reverse washing experiment. To the naked eye, my hair looked thick and ‘oomph’-ed, but in reality it just felt quite gross.

Wash 7

After two weeks of a reverse washing routine, I finally completed my experiment. I don’t think my hair had ever gone through as many phases in such a short space of time before. It started off as kind of a hair honeymoon phase where my locks were doing everything that I desired – I finally had that matte texture that I’d longed for, but then after the first week we entered a greasy period that made my scalp feel oily as hell. By the end of the fortnight, my hair felt really quite unclean and I was desperate to give it a proper scrub with shampoo.

TL;DR:

After the two week period was over and I washed my hair ‘normally’ for the first time, I couldn’t get over just how soft and clean my hair felt. I think that if you have a big event coming up where you want your hair to hold a particular style all night long, adapting a short term reverse washing technique would be beneficial. However, I can’t help but notice that my hair does look a lot healthier in the ‘After’ image than the ‘Before’, my frizzy ends are rather considerably eradicated and my hair does look a lot smoother. Would I consider using this method again? Yes, but I wouldn’t do it for as long, I’d probably only adapt the reverse technique for three rinses or so, because it seemed to be after that length of time when I really did notice a build up of product which weighed my hair down and made it more prone to getting greasy.