Beer Rinse: For Curly Hair & Zero Waste

I've been following the curly girl method for the past seven months, and one of the biggest tenants of following this method is striking the perfect balance between moisture and protein in your hair. Finding this balance causes people to do crazy things, like rinse their hair in beer. 

Since I have fine hair I tend to need more protein than moisture and tend to do protein treatments a few times a month. However, my current bottle comes in plastic so when I finish using it up I want to find zero waste solutions to getting my hair it's protein fix. I had read that doing beer rinses could be a great protein treatment for your curls, but I haven't yet been brave enough to try it out. 
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Sunday night Kyle and I made an Irish dinner for Saint Patrick's Day, which also included a few gigantic beers. I couldn't finish my whole beer, but rather than letting the rest of it go to waste I left it out on the counter overnight so I could finally try a beer rinse in the morning. 

Here's what I did: 

In the morning I transferred my beer into a plastic dispenser bottle to make life a little easier on myself and I grabbed a bowl and took them up to the bathroom with me. I usually wash my hair in the morning just leaning over my tub. Following the instructions from this blog post I wet my hair down completely and shampooed it. Then I started rinsing it with the beer, letting it collect in the bowl so I could continue to use it. ​

After pouring it all over my hair I lifted the bowl to my hair to left it soak in the beer. I kept switching between that and finger combing my hair. It seriously felt like I had just deep conditioned it, my hair was so silky and smooth and moisturized feeling I could hardly believe it was beer (however, the smell did remind me).

A few minutes of doing this and then I rinsed out my hair completely and conditioned it, and then styled as normal. Here are the results: 

Honestly it came out pretty good! This is a pretty normal wash day for me so I was happy with it overall. The only issue is I think next time I should shampoo after because you could still smell the beer on my scalp closer to where it was more difficult to rinse out and where I wasn't conditioning. I smelled the bottom of my hair where I could and I couldn't smell any beer on it so I think that's definitely the way to go. 

I would definitely do this again. I love that beer is super cheap and you can always recycle glass or aluminum, making this a perfect zero waste technique for getting protein into your hair.