Goat Milk Soap…as Shampoo? Here’s My Story with Best Tips to Make It Work

At Bend Soap, we’re not shy about our love of using goat milk as a base for skincare products. After all, our goat milk soap and lotion products have not only been life savers for members of the Bend Soap family, they’ve been instrumental in providing relief for many of our customers’ painful and itchy skin conditions. 

I’ve been loving my Bend Soap products. I’ve been an avid user of the Goat Milk Soap, lotion, bath, and deodorant from the first time I tried it. We’ll call it love at first try. 

Goat Milk Soap and lotion have made such a positive impact on my skin that I’m always dreaming up new ways to put the goat milk to good use as a cleanser. 

Which got me thinking…

If goat milk soap could make such an improvement on my skin, what could it do for my scalp and hair?

There was only one way to find out! I swapped my normal organic shampoo for the Oatmeal Honey All-Natural Goat Milk Soap bar for a month, and here are some of my takeaways from the experience - including some of the trials along the way!

A Soap-tastrophe

At first, I wasn’t sure how to use the all natural soap bar as shampoo because I had never washed my scalp and hair with something with such a hard consistency. All of my shampoos up until this point have been in liquid form.

Unfortunately, I didn’t formulate much of a plan, and I took the bar of soap straight to my head!!!

Not only did this knot my hair up something fierce, it left my strands begging for moisture. For reference, my ethnic background is Puerto Rican and Italian, and my hair texture is incredibly tight curls that are prone to dryness. My best guess for the brittleness following the soap as shampoo is that my results stemmed from having no control over the amount of soap during application. I couldn’t tell how much I was applying as I happily scrubbed away at my scalp. Once my hair dried, I looked a bit like I’d stuck my finger in an electric socket. I was a frizzball! My extremely dried out hair took a few days of intense moisturizing to regain its natural pattern.

However…

Despite the overapplication, the thing I was most pleased with after using goat milk soap as shampoo was how CLEAN my scalp felt. My scalp was the cleanest I’ve ever accomplished with home wash; it’s the type of clean I only associate with a vigorous salon hair-and-scalp scrub. I can’t ever seem to dislodge hair product build up, oil, and dead skin without drying out my scalp, but the bar soap stripped all the dirt away effectively. 

A Second Attempt at Goat Milk Soap Shampoo 

I didn’t love how lank my hair felt after the first time, but I decided to try it again with a different approach because I loved the feel of my squeaky clean scalp too much to give up (besides, a clean, unclogged scalp is supposedly the secret to faster hair growth!) 

The second time, I lathered up the goat milk soap in my hands first until I had a handful of soapy bubbles, then I made a conscious effort to only massage the soap suds into my scalp and root area to prevent it slipping down to my ends, the driest part of the hair. 

Not only was my scalp clean, but the rest of my hair was able to hold on to its moisture and maintain its bounce. Double win!

Natural Soap Bar Shampoo: My Tips and Final Verdict 

Would I use the goat milk soap bar as shampoo again in the future?

The answer is a resounding YES! I have already been using the product as my shampoo replacement over the past couple of months, and I plan to continue from here on out. However, there was a learning curve that you can avoid by sticking to the following tips and takeaways. 

Don’t be like me. Don’t oversoap your poor head. I would recommend using the lather up method where you part your hair and build up the suds in your hands before gently massaging the goat milk soap into your scalp. 

You can always add more if you are trying to deep clean and detox your scalp from product build up.

Mix it with your conditioner, apply it with a washcloth - be creative with how you apply it to best suit your strands. 

For me, the perfect cadence is to use the goat milk soap as shampoo every other week. As someone with extremely dry curly hair, I already only followed a once a week shampoo routine, though I do condition and co-wash throughout the week. 

The goat milk soap used as shampoo does such a fantastic job that I don’t need to use it as often (which is good news for me, so I can extend the life of my soap bar.)

The same properties of the goat milk soap that help alleviate and deeply cleanse the pores and remove excess oil from our skin work the same on our hair. 

While the goat milk soap had the desired effect in cleaning my scalp from weeks (or months, eek! 😬) of product build up, it was too strong for my already chronically dry hair.

I hypothesize that this would work wonders for anyone with a more oily hair type, but again - playing with frequency and method of application (in my case, only my roots) is advised as you figure it out.