How to wash your hair in space

Karen Nyberg, expedition 36 crew member: Hi there. I have had a lot of people ask me how I wash my hair in space and I thought I would show you how I do it. Let’s see, to get started these are the things I need: a bag of warm water, a little no-rinse shampoo, towel and my comb.

What I like to do is start by just putting some hot water, squirting it onto my scalp, and I have a mirror here so I can kind of watch what I’m doing. Sometimes the water gets away from you and you try and catch as much as you can. And I just work the water up through to the ends of my hair. Then I take my no-rinse shampoo and squirt it also on the scalp, just a little bit and rub it in. Again kind of working it up to the ends and sometimes I’ll actually take my comb to help work it all the way to the ends. And then I like to take my towel while I have the shampoo in there and just kind of work it because without standing under running water you kind of need to use the towel a little bit to help get some of the dirt out. I like to follow that by a little more water. It’s called no-rinse shampoo but I think it’s best if you use a little water with it. It actually feels kind of squeaky clean right now. Now I will take the dry part of my towel, we use towels for quite a while here since we have limited supplies. We use them wisely. There, I think that’s pretty good and now as my hair dries as the water evaporates from my hair, it will become humidity in the air and then our air conditioning system will collect that into condensate and it won’t be long and our water-processing system will turn that into drinking water. At the end I just do one final comb-through to make sure there are no snarls and snags, and while it dries I like to let it stay, stay free. I don’t put it back in a ponytail while it’s drying. And that is how I wash my hair in space on the International Space Station.

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