yeah. i think the notion is that your scalp produces oils which are great for smoothing and protecting your hair and making it appear all shiny. if you have a soft brush and you brush your hair you can brush the oils from the scalp down along the length of your hair and that makes it go all nice and shiny and protected. thats kinda why... your scalp makes the oil.

shampoo strips the oil out of your hair. frequent use shampoo is milder, but the point of shampoo is to remove the oil, i guess. if you wash your hair very frequently then your scalp tends to try and compensate by producing more oil and before you know it you need to wash it every day...

a lot of the products that we put in our hair to help smooth our hair and make it shiny and protected basically function (when all goes well and they are good products) to put that oil (that we just removed with the shampoo) back into our hair.

kind of strip it out then replace it with something synthetic lol.

the things we do ;-)

the oil is how come dreds get to be self cleaning. you don't shampoo dreds, you just rinse them with water to get the dust off basically, lol. takes a little time but the scalp oils basically wash / clense the hair without your needing to shampoo.

i guess the basic issue with the scalp oils is that they don't smell as fresh and pleasant as shampoo and other products. i'm not sure that they smell unpleasant, exactly, but it certainly doesn't smell as good as the products we buy...

i don't have the ideal soft bristle brush for brushing my hair, but the brush i do have does work to distribute the oils a bit. when i wash my hair i use just a tiny bit of shampoo and lather it between my hands first and try and massage it into my scalp without getting much of it on the rest of my hair (so as not to remove the oils). then condition the crap out of the ends... it kinda works for me but... who knows...

i haven't done this for a long time... but as a teenager i used to use a little bit of baby oil on my hair after shampooing (because my mother insisted on buying this nasty conditioner that made my hair superfluffy). you need to rinse it out with warm water, though. not sure if that helps or not... dunno... probably in the realm of folk myth...

i did notice, however, that one of the leave in conditioning treatments that i brought made a big claim of having 'sunflower oils' as an ingredient. sunflower oil...