Why your hair gets drier with age, and how to bring the moisture back
If your hair feels drier, frizzier or harder to settle than it did ten years ago, the usual explanation is "it's just older hair" and left at that. The more specific reason is worth knowing: the oil gland attached to every hair follicle slows down as we age, the same way the ones in your skin do, and hair that's used to being lubricated from the root suddenly isn't getting as much. It isn't damaged. It's under-oiled.
Grey hair isn't coarser. It's just drier
There's a common belief that grey or white hair is naturally wirier than the hair around it. Hair specialists say the opposite is closer to the truth: hair tends to get finer as we age, not coarser, and greying usually starts right around the time the sebaceous gland attached to that follicle begins producing less oil. What feels like a coarse, frizzy grey hair is often a fine hair with nothing left to smooth it down. Deal with the dryness and a lot of that "coarse" feeling tends to go with it.
Why your regular shampoo can make it worse
Most supermarket shampoo is built to lather hard and strip everything, oil included, which is a fair job when a scalp is producing plenty of its own and a frustrating one once it isn't. Every wash takes a little more of what oil is left, and the days in between are spent trying to catch up. Grass-fed tallow behaves differently on hair for much the same reason it works on skin: its fatty acid makeup, mostly oleic, palmitic and stearic acid, sits close to what a scalp naturally produces, so a tallow-based bar can clean without stripping hair back to nothing.
What we'd reach for
For hair on the drier or more mature side, our Tallow Shampoo & Conditioner Bar is the one we'd start with. It's formulated at 8% superfat, meaning a good amount of extra fat is left in the bar rather than turned into soap, so it cleans and conditions in one step without a separate bottle afterwards. If your hair sits somewhere in the middle, wanting a wash that doesn't strip but doesn't need to be that rich either, the Tallow Shampoo Bar in cedarwood is a lighter, everyday option built on the same gentle base. Think of superfat here the way you would with our soap bars: the higher the number, the more the bar is built for hair that needs feeding, not just cleaning.
If your hair is fine, sits close to the scalp, or gets weighed down easily, a rich 8% bar can be more than it needs. The Tallow Crown Shampoo Bar is formulated at a lighter 3% superfat for exactly that, a gentle clean without much left behind afterwards. There's no need to guess. If your ends feel like straw by the afternoon, go richer. If your roots feel flat and heavy by lunchtime, go lighter, and put the extra conditioning into a leave-in balm instead.
Work it in at the scalp first, not just the lengths. That's where the oil actually needs replacing. Massage the bar in gently at the roots, let the lather carry down through the rest of the hair on its way out, then give it a proper rinse. Don't expect the same squeaky, stripped feeling you're used to from a bottle. That feeling was never proof of clean hair, only of dry hair. Most people also do better washing every second or third day rather than daily, since a scalp that's already producing less oil doesn't need to be stripped of it every morning.
Hair holds onto old habits about as slowly as skin does, so give it a handful of washes rather than one before deciding whether it's helping. Everything we make comes out of a small kitchen at Fulham Homestead in Victoria, batch by batch, so have a look through the shampoo bars and see which superfat suits where your hair is at right now.