Back when I was in college in Washington state, I noticed my hair was looking dull. I knew we had hard water (loaded with minerals), so I thought that might be the culprit. I heard somewhere (probably Pinterest tbh) that rinsing your hair with apple cider vinegar can remove any buildup and make your hair look shinier. This made sense to me because I removed the calcium buildup on the faucet with white vinegar, so ACV should get rid of any buildup on my hair. Right?
Honestly, I don’t know if that’s how it works, but I did start rinsing my hair with ACV. I stopped when I moved back to California, but my scalp has been super itchy recently so I decided to give ACV another try since I’ve also heard that it can help with dandruff/itchiness.
In fact, there are a LOT claims about what ACV can do for your hair. For the sake of this blog post, let’s use this Cosmopolitan article as our reference, since it includes many commonly touted benefits of ACV. (And we’ll just ignore the sentence where they say “it won’t strip your hair (or curls)” as if curls aren’t hair.)
The article makes these claims about weekly ACV rinses:
- ACV treats dandruff.
- ACV helps scalp itchiness and irritation.
- ACV clarifies product buildup.
- ACV makes hair shiny and smooth.
I’ll go into detail about whether or not I’ve experienced each of these benefits in one month of using apple cider vinegar rinses while washing my hair.