Ladies (and gentlemen, if you also suffer from the horrible affliction of greasy hair), I have big news.
For years, I’ve had a secret shame. Despite frequently being told by friends, family, hairdressers and strangers on the street that it was very bad, I’ve washed my hair every day.
I heard their arguments about the damage it was doing to my poor little follicles, and the importance of teaching your hair to clean itself, and I blatantly ignored them. The alternative was unacceptable: my hair was so greasy 24 hours after a wash that no amount of dry shampoo, second-day-ponytails or brightly-coloured hats could save it.
I’d pretty much resigned myself to the fact that this was my life now. I was an every-day-hair-washer. I wasn’t proud of it (well, okay, I was a little proud of it, in the way that you might be defiantly proud of a weirdly shaped mole), but I was just doing what had to be done.
Then last week, I went to my hairdresser to get my roots done (very important, since dark roots have a rude habit of emphasising dirty hair). Because I was about to get my hair professionally washed and blow-dried, I’d done the inexcusable – let my hair go 48 hours without a wash.
“Is it…” My hairdresser was momentarily lost for words. “Is it always like this?”
Yes, I told him proudly. It is always like this when I don’t wash it. What can you do, hey? It’s just the way I am.
At the end of my appointment, he suggested I try a new conditioning treatment. It's called Niophlex Maintainer 03, and it claims to strengthen hair follicles from within. Naturally, as a vain sucker who'd just had a blowdry, and is also very bad at saying no to someone who's just spent three hours touching my head, I agreed.