I am not a morning person. So when I first get up, I tend to do flaky things. But recently I set a new low.

I got in the shower, still half-asleep, and reached for the shampoo. After rubbing some in my hair, I realized it didn’t smell like my shampoo. Turned out I had grabbed the bottle on my left instead of the usual bottle of shampoo on my right. So I found myself trying to wash my hair with Oil of Olay body wash.

The body wash had come free with my purchase of Oil of Olay (around here we call it Oil of Ol’ Lady) facial moisturizer. I had tried the body wash a few times, but didn’t like how it made my washcloth so slimy that I couldn’t rinse it out, so the body wash had been sitting there untouched for weeks because I couldn’t make myself throw out a practically full bottle.

Anyway, once I realized my mistake, I rinsed my hair (only the top of my head had body wash on it) and then shampooed as usual. But when I used the hair dryer on my hair, I couldn’t get the top of my head dry.

Weird. But I had things to do, so I left my hair the way it was. However, after a few hours of feeling like my hair was extremely greasy (and it looked it), I decided to do something about it. I remembered that my grandmother always rinsed her hair with vinegar water “to cut the soap,” as she explained. So I filled the bathroom sink with vinegar water, soaked the top of my head in it, then used my husband’s strong shampoo (Head and Shoulders) to rewash my hair.

When I dried it, it was just as greasy on top as it had been before.

Now I began to get frustrated. How could I get this greasy mess out of my hair? I looked at the body wash bottle label to see what exactly was in this stuff, and discovered that the second ingredient is petroleum jelly. No wonder I couldn’t get my hair to come clean!

I remembered that we had a bottle of Trader Joe’s Tea Tree Oil shampoo in the cupboard. That’s strong stuff, so I figured it was worth a try. After two washes with it, my hair finally began to feel like normal, and I was relieved to be able to go out in public without look like I hadn’t had a shower in a week.

So, the moral of this story is….never use body wash as shampoo, and keep tea tree oil shampoo on hand for people who have a hard time waking up, like me!