I stumbled upon a Yahoo! article last week titled “Bumble and bumble Founder Says No One Will Use Shampoo in 5 Years.” My first thoughts were: Why is the “b” of the second bumble not capitalized? Was that just a typo? Will no one use typos in five years? Maybe that’s the question you should be asking, shampoo article.
Still too curious to let it go, I went to Bumble and bumble’s site and found that the “b” of the second bumble was not capitalized there, either. That’s when I remembered that some phenomena are simply too enigmatic to ever be explained. The “b” of the second bumble is like the mystery of what came before the Big Bang. It’s like the Loch Ness monster, like Bigfoot; it’s like that weird situation where cats lift their butts into the air when you pet them.
Finally remembering what got me started on this track, I thought: Big deal. Who cares if no one will use shampoo in five years; there are more important things to worry about right now. Have you seen the air in Beijing? That stuff is brown! And the world’s oceans are turning to acid—mostly because of us. And Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato are apparently on the outs again, and there’s nothing I can do about that, okay?
After I got all of this out of my system, I continued reading the article and began to see shampoo in a different light. It seems that plenty of people gave it up years ago, or at least began to use it less and less, because shampoos evidently contain not-so-wonderful ingredients like silicones and detergents and sodium laureth sulfate. And if you can’t say it five times fast, maybe you shouldn’t be putting it on you.
As if the sodium laureth sulfate bomb wasn’t enough, I kept reading Joanna Douglas’s article (kind of a shout-out to another article on Wired) and eventually realized, near the end of it, what kind of effect all this anti-shampoo information could have on the world. Replacing shampoos with eco-friendly alternatives would supposedly cut down on the number of products bought per person since the only reason we need conditioners is because of the chemicals in shampoo. Less products purchased would mean less trash at your local dump, right?
If one person made this change, it wouldn’t do all that much, but think of what could happen if, say, a kazillion people made this change. All right, kazillion is maybe a ridiculous figure. Now that I think of it, I’m pretty sure it’s not even a real number, but you get my point. Major, positive changes could happen just because of some words in an article. Sure, it probably wouldn’t bring Selena and Demi back together, but our planet (and our hair, and the hair of our children and our children’s children) might just thank us for it.