The Dandruff Lie We've All Been Told

Erica and I drive ten hours each way between our home in Westchester and our place in Charlevoix, Quebec. It's a long haul — stretches of breathtaking beauty along the St. Lawrence and through the Adirondacks followed by long, flat highways where the only entertainment is your own thoughts. We've made the trip enough times that we've developed rituals: the café outside Montreal where we always stop, the playlist that carries us through the Laurentians, and the running debate about what to do with our hands.

Not a metaphor. Our literal hands. Every gas stop means touching a pump that's been handled by thousands of strangers. The gas station bathrooms, when you can stomach them, leave you feeling no cleaner than when you walked in. Hand sanitizer is the obvious answer — except Erica and I can't stand it. My hands crack badly in the winter as it is. Dousing them in alcohol every few hours is the equivalent of rubbing sandpaper on an open wound.

It turns out that all hand sanitizers are essentially just rubbing alcohol. Ethyl alcohol, isopropyl alcohol, benzalkonium chloride — pick your poison. The FDA mandates one of these three if you want to call something a sanitizer, an antimicrobial, or an antibacterial. We discovered this the hard way when we invented an alcohol-free hand sanitizer for Sans Savon using a naturally derived fermentation system that is clinically proven to eliminate 99.9% of all dangerous microorganisms — from salmonella to E. coli to the fungus that causes athlete's foot — while actually hydrating your skin in the process. We couldn't legally call it a sanitizer. We had to shelve it. We still have the samples in the car.

I tell this story because it is a perfect setup for what I really want to talk about: the FDA, dandruff, and a vicious cycle that the personal care industry has been profiting from for decades. We have nearly 5,500 New Wash customers who wrote about their scalp health — unprompted, in their own words — and what they have to say is something the makers of Head & Shoulders do not want you to read.

The ingredients they approve. The damage they cause.

Here's what the FDA has decided: if your product claims to control dandruff, it must contain one of five approved active ingredients. Pyrithione zinc. Coal tar. Salicylic acid. Selenium sulfide. Sulfur. Those are your options. The science is settled, apparently. Case closed.

The problem is that every single one of these ingredients is, in some sense, a chemical assault on your scalp. Let's take them one at a time.

Pyrithione zinc — the most common, found in Head & Shoulders and its many descendants — is frequently associated with a stinging, burning sensation on the scalp. It was also banned in Europe in 2022 as a potential reproductive toxin. Coal tar, the old-school heavy artillery, suppresses DNA synthesis to slow skin cell production. It also stains your skin and hair, causes photosensitivity, and California requires a label warning it may cause cancer. Salicylic acid is a peeling agent — it literally breaks down the intercellular cement that holds skin cells together. Very effective at its job; also exceptionally effective at making your hair feel like straw, causing rebound flaking, and stripping hair color. Selenium sulfide, often called in when the others fail, smells like rotten eggs and can discolor your hair. Sulfur, the gentlest of the five and generally considered not effective enough on its own, also smells like rotten eggs.

Every single one of these approved options treats the symptom while making the underlying problem worse. The dandruff comes back the moment you stop — usually with a vengeance. This is not an accident. It is, to put it plainly, a business model.

What dandruff actually is. And what actually causes it.

If you've been following my writing about Hairstory and New Wash, you already understand the basic problem with shampoo. But it bears repeating here, because it's the key to understanding why the entire category of anti-dandruff products is built on a false premise.

When I first started working at Bumble and bumble, I discovered something the high-end salon world considers common knowledge but almost nobody outside it knows: hairdressers at the best salons almost universally believe that shampoo is the enemy of good hair. Not a particular shampoo. Shampoo itself. Their advice to clients, consistently, was to wash less. This was awkward for a company trying to sell shampoo, but it made sense. Why is second-day hair almost always better? Because day-one hair has been stripped of everything it needs to look and feel healthy.

I have a simple rule I've used ever since: if it foams, it strips. Every shampoo — sulfate-free, SLS-free, "gentle," organic, whatever the label claims — over-cleans. The amphiphilic molecules that create the foam are powerful enough to bond with and remove not just the dirt and sweat and styling product, but your body's natural protective oil barrier and your entire scalp microbiome.

Here is where the itchy scalp, the tender head, the sore scalp and the dandruff come in. When you wash away your protective oils, your skin has to work overtime to replace them. In the meantime, your microbiome — the community of bacteria and microorganisms that evolved to protect you — has been washed down the drain. What rushes in to replace it is not always what you want. Overactive oil glands, exposed skin, and an invitation for invasive microorganisms to take hold. The result is a stressed, irritated scalp. Itchiness. Flaking. In more severe cases, dermatitis, psoriasis, or significant hair loss.

Dandruff isn't a disease you catch. It isn't a condition you're born with. In most cases, it's a symptom of disruption. And the thing disrupting your scalp is the same thing being sold to you as the solution.

How New Wash works differently.

The first time I used the product that would become New Wash, I was standing in the shower. Michael Gordon, my old boss at Bumble and bumble, had handed me a bottle at the end of a meeting — a meeting where I was actively trying not to get involved in his new venture. He had not had a great few years. But the product was extraordinary.

No foam. No bubbles. Just a ludicrously luxurious cream, the consistency of custard, that massaged into my hair and rinsed clean. My hair felt soft, with a slight slip. Not squeaky-clean — a different kind of clean. And I understood immediately why: without any detergent, the oil-based cleansers had removed what needed to go and left behind a light, conditioning coating. Within six months I was a co-founder of Hairstory.

Here's the science behind why it works. To clean anything you need amphiphilic molecules — molecules that are both oil-loving and water-loving. The oil-loving side grabs onto dirt, sweat, and the bacteria you want removed. When you rinse, the water-loving side bonds to water molecules and the whole clump goes down the drain. Every cleaning system in the world works on this principle — from dish soap to surgical scrubs. The difference is in how aggressive those molecules are, and what collateral damage they do.

Shampoo's molecules are aggressive. New Wash uses a different class entirely — oil-based cleansers derived from essential oils and esters that are strong enough to remove what you want gone, but not strong enough to strip your body's natural defenses. Some of those molecules don't fully rinse away. They attach to your hair as emollients — long carbon chains with extraordinary conditioning properties. This is why New Wash is both a cleanser and a conditioner, and why it has no competition in the marketplace a decade after launching.

For your scalp, the result is the absence of the vicious cycle. No stripping. No frantic oil overproduction. No microbiome vacuum for invasive microorganisms to fill. A calmer scalp. And a calmer scalp, it turns out, is something a lot of people have been desperately looking for.

We recently did a full analysis of our New Wash reviews — all 25,513 of them. Nearly one in five reviewers mentioned scalp health specifically. That's 5,489 people who didn't just buy a hair product; they came to us with a problem. Scalp-related reviews average 4.30 stars, with almost 80% rated four or five stars. These are not people who were mildly satisfied. They were relieved.

The dandruff numbers alone: 576 reviews, 74% positive. One customer put it simply:

"I had a minor to moderate problem with dandruff... my hair is clean-feeling and my scalp is not dried out and my dandruff has essentially disappeared."

Psoriasis — a condition I've always been especially careful not to make claims about — had the highest positive rate of any condition we tracked. 133 reviews, 80% positive. One reviewer captured something I think is exactly right:

"This is not a cure-all for a genetic disease, but the claims that your scalp will feel less irritated without detergents is true."

That's the honest version of the pitch. We're not curing anything. We're removing the thing that was making it worse.

The itchy and irritated scalp category was the largest: nearly 1,500 reviews, running between 75% and 82% positive. The pattern in those reviews is almost always the same — someone who had tried everything the drugstore offered, arrived skeptical, and left converted. We can't make that claim legally. Thanks, FDA. But our customers can. And they do, in extraordinary volume.

The woman who invented New Wash.

I've always been reluctant to share this story, because it edges toward a claim we can't legally make. But I've decided the customers' voices speak loudly enough that I'm willing to add my own.

The woman who co-invented New Wash did so because she had been struggling her entire life with severe psoriasis on her scalp. It was bad enough that she was receiving regular steroid injections directly into her scalp in an attempt to manage it. She suspected that shampoo was at least partly responsible, and possibly making it significantly worse. Creating New Wash gave her — for the first time — relief.

Since founding Hairstory, people with sensitive, irritated scalps have become a huge and loyal part of our customer base. They found us the way most people find things that actually work: through desperation, then skepticism, then disbelief at the result. They weren't looking for a scalp serum or a fancy new ingredient. They were looking to stop the cycle. And New Wash stopped it for them.

The irony of the FDA situation isn't lost on me. We have an alcohol-free, naturally derived, clinically proven antimicrobial system sitting in a car in Quebec that we can't bring to market because it doesn't fit a regulatory category written before any of this science existed. We have a hair cleanser that nearly 5,500 customers have credited with meaningfully improving their scalp health — and we can't publicly claim it treats dandruff. Maybe the answer isn't to wait for the regulations to catch up. Maybe it's to let enough customers tell their own stories until the noise becomes impossible to ignore.

If you have a sore scalp, a tender head, persistent itchiness, or dandruff that keeps coming back the moment you stop using whichever medicated shampoo you've been prescribed: the shampoo is not solving your problem. It is your problem.

Stop stripping. Give your scalp the chance to calm down. See what happens.

I think you'll be surprised.