Do You Really Have to Wash Your Hair?

The so-called "French shower," that curious Napoleonic custom of applying perfume or deodorant over unwashed flesh, went out of style with pantaloons, and certainly never spread to these more hygienic shores. Right? Au contraire: Hello, dry shampoo. Touted as a water and timesaving way to stay quote-unquote gorgeous on the go, these wildly popular shampoo substitutes allow the busiest exec to head straight from the bedroom to the boardroom without a pesky shower in between. Just apply a cumulus of powder to the scalp, wait two minutes before brushing it out, and voila! Fabulosity achieved.

The market for dry shampoos, which are sold in both spray-on and powdered formulas, has exploded over the past few years. Name a high-end hair-care brand—Frederic Fekkai, Bumble and bumble, Oscar Blandi, Rene Futerer—and the chances are good that a revolutionary new dry-shampoo product is one of the top-selling items in the company's inventory. Their average price hovers around $20 for about 3 ounces—not exactly a bargain. So, how well do they work?

Old-fashioned wet shampoo cleans hair of all of the assorted gunk and free radicals that accumulate over the course of a day, as well as its natural oils, which are known as sebum. Dry shampoo, which usually has a base of talc, cornstarch, potato, or rice, soaks up rather than washes away sebum and dirt. When you brush out the powder, you're also (allegedly) brushing out the grime, too. Because the soak-up/brush-out method doesn't rid the hair of as much sebum, you can safely use dry shampoos once or several times between regular shampooings. But alert: Because dry shampoos are essentially spray-on powders, they can, even after vigorous brushing, lighten the crown of your head, which can be good or bad, depending on your desired hair color.

I spoke to a half-dozen dry shampoo devotees about their reliance on these potions. One "natural blonde" said dry shampoo helps her disguise suspicious roots on the brink of her next highlight appointment, since the powder tends to lighten the hair. Another turns to it when she can't submit to the 45-minute blow-dry required to tame her frizzy curls. (The New York Times ran a markedly pre-recession story [2] last February on women who are accustomed to getting salon blow-dries every week and use dry shampoos to prolong the life of their high-maintenance styles.) Then there are the avid gym-goers who use it after midday workouts, and the partygoers who want to refresh their appearance in the office bathroom.

I recruited three testers with a range of hair types. Two are chemically enhanced blondes, one with thick hair and a schedule that only allows her to hit the gym during lunch. The second blonde has thin hair that looks flat and oily by the end of the workday; she'd prefer to take a second shower before any nighttime assignations. My third tester has thick, wavy, jet-black hair that requires herculean efforts to manage. All three work full-time and shampoo daily.

I, too, joined in. I have brown, straight, generally obedient hair that I never, ever wash on a daily basis, having been taught early on that too-frequent washing strips and damages hair over the long run. (And according to a recent NPR story [3], we Americans wash our hair way more often than is altogether civilized, averaging 4.59 shampoos a week, or twice as often as Italians and Spaniards.) Could the most ingenious of these products allow me to extend my alternate-day shampooing routine to every third day?

The candidates, from worst to best...

Klorane Gentle Dry Shampoo with Oat Milk [4] ($18)

The smell was nice, but just a few hours after applying it, my hair looked dull and clumped and much dirtier than pre-application. Other testers agreed: scent good, efficacy not so much. But apparently, the Klorane is great for period-piece updos; this was the product that held Kirsten Dunst's hair in place in Marie Antoinette [5]. (In general, dry shampoos work well with any sort of retro bouffant beehive, since less squeaky-clean hair is more amenable to styling.) Brunettes should steer clear of this product, though: It didn't entirely brush out of the black-haired tester's hair, and even after a wet shampoo, some sticky residue lingered.

Shampowder [6] ($15.99)

The application process is promising—aerosol-free, with a little built-in blush-brush contraption that you dust over your scalp. The downside: The talc-based Shampowder smelled like cheap makeup and did basically nothing to de-grease hair. It was messy, too, with powder sprinkling over clothing every time we tapped out more. Too bad, because the Shampowder comes in different colors for people whose hair looks unnaturally dusty beneath a veil of white dust.

Oscar Blandi Pronto Dry Shampoo Spray [7] ($21)

This one has a great (if a tad overpowering) lemony smell, but it didn't do much even to fake-clean hair. It was especially unsuited to the tester with the thinnest, oiliest hair, leaving her hair even limper than before. And while the white color did brush out easily of the black-haired tester's scalp (and mine), it didn't do much to lighten the roots of the blondes. An all-around mediocre product, except for scent.

Bumble and bumble hair powder [8] ($19-$35)

Like the Shampowder, the Bumble and bumble is made for different hair colors and comes in black, brown, blondish, red, and white—you're pretty much spray-painting your hair with color as well as powder. While the tinting element is a big selling point, especially for brunettes who want to stay brunettes, I didn't enjoy the brownish residue that rubbed onto my fingers every time I touched my hair. Made from a combination of corn, tapioca, and oat starches, the Bumble and bumble is among the thicker, stiffer products tested, too, and gives a gauzy cotton-candy texture to hair. My blond friends loved its root-concealing properties, though, and the vampirish Katy Perry [9] swore her allegiance to the black spray in a recent Vanity Fair story.

Ojon Rub-Out Dry Cleanser [10] ($26)

Amazon reviewers anticipated my precise complaints about the unfortunate odor of an otherwise fairly wonderful product. One said that the Ojon dry shampoo "smelled like something out of my grandmother's perfume cabinet"; two others described it as "a cross between incense and some old lady's perfume" and "a cross between old lady perfume and funeral home." It's too bad these descriptions are so apt, because the potato-starch-based Ojon did its job well. We liked how you rub it into your scalp before brushing it out, and for me, it seemed a semi-plausible stand-in for an actual shampoo. I just wasn't so keen on leaving the house in an old-lady cloud.

Frederic Fekkai Au Naturel Dry Shampoo [11] ($23)

Frederic Fekkai was far and away my favorite: My hair did feel a little cleaner post-application, and I preferred sprinkling the rice-and corn-based powder directly into my scalp to enveloping the entire bathroom in an aerosol brume, as some of the other products demanded. Plus, no aerosol also meant no oppressive scent or easily clogged nozzle. I was the only tester to admire these low-tech touches, however. "Ugh, I feel like Martha Washington," the most meticulously groomed tester groaned as the white powder dribbled onto her collar.

Rene Furterer Naturia Dry Shampoo [12] ($24)

With only one exception, the dry-shampoo lovers of my acquaintance preferred the Furterer. Though none of us were wild about the baby-powder scent, which reeked of Secret deodorant, this rice-based spray was a relative winner. The thin-haired tester found that the Furterer gave her hair the most lift. A solid, inoffensive pick for frequent use—no fireworks, but no glaring flaws, either.

The verdict:

Dry shampoo can be a godsend if you're very busy or very blond. When applied sparingly, it can also give hair a much-needed pick-me-up after a long day at work, but it is not a substitute for proper soap-and-water shampoo. "A stopgap, not an equivalent," one tester said...at the same time admitting that she would turn to dry shampoos on frenzied mornings in the future. But until Frederic Fekkai figures out how to bottle the invigorating rush of a hot shower on a dreary morning, I'm sticking to my old routine.