How Often Should You Wash Your Hair?

So you’ve gotten rid of your two-in-one shampoo and conditioner; but now, you have no idea how often you’re supposed to use those fancy new shampoo and conditioner bottles sitting in your shower.

While hair wash day might feel like a chore, it’s actually important to establish a timely hair routine for a reason that goes largely overlooked: scalp health. The accumulation of grime and even our own natural hair oils can lead to clogged pores on the spaces in our scalp, eventually leading to an infection.

How Often Should Men Men Wash Their Hair?

“In an ideal world, I would say, wash your hair every three to four days,” says Melissa DeZarate, a hair groomer and celebrity men’s hair stylist whose clients include Benson Boone, Henry Golding, and Andrew Scott. “The bare minimum that I like to tell everyone is at literally the absolute bare minimum once a week,”

If people do want to drag hair wash day out longer than a week, DeZarate recommends at the very least to use a scalp scrub or detox shampoo to renew the scalp.

Identifying Your Hair Type and Scalp Needs

How often someone washes their hair also depends on a variety of factors, including hair texture, hair length, diet, and the environment, says Dr. Christina Weng, a board-certified dermatologist at Massachusetts General Hospital who sees patients for hair-and-scalp health.

For those with fine hair, it’s easier to accumulate grease and buildup, so fine hair requires more frequent washes than thicker, coarser hair, which distributes moisture more evenly than thin hair.

How often someone has to wash their hair also depends on their hair type, says Simone Kogen, a celebrity hair stylist and groomer who has worked with Jonathan Bailey and Nicholas Hoult.

For this reason, rinsing your hair with just water has to be done more frequently. Dr. Wang recommends those with thin hair to do it five to six times a week, while those with thicker hair can do it two to three times a week.

“With washing your hair less and letting the time between hair washes go longer, there’s more time for sebum accumulation, and the composition of that sebum, that oil, changes once it’s exposed to air, once it’s secreted by the oil glands,” says Dr. Weng. “It’s exposed to oxygen in the environment, it gets oxidized, and some of that can cause skin irritation and inflammation, and also microbial overgrowth and fungal overgrowth.”

Why You Should Focus on Your Scalp, Too

DeZarate, Kogen, and Weng all emphasize the importance of scalp health when it comes to shampooing hair.