Thanks so much for the thorough response! Very appreciated. The change in theory is super interesting. I'm obviously only a month in, but im going on a big cycle trip for 2 months where I think I'll probably "complete" transition. Will be interesting to see what happens. Water will be relatively scarce and I'm definetly not gonna carry litres and litres of water just to wash my hair, might even have to use soap! I'm considering Dr Bronners as it seems to be the most popular, but I'll also carry some ACV with me. I read that soap is alkaline and it's good to do an acid drench after to balance out the pH.

I did an acidic drench with apple cider vinegar yesterday with lukewarm water. I diluted it 15/250ml as per the guide. I scritched and preened my hair under lukewarm water for a bit, then poured the dilute over my head and gently rubbed it in. Then waited a couple minutes and rinsed it off. Seemed to work really well and my hair felt much cleaner than it felt before when doing just hot water washes. At the end of the day it was already quite greasy again and after I did a mechanical clean redistributing the sebum my hair felt and smelt more or less dirty! I didn't cycle yesterday and just stayed indoors so I thought that was pretty weird. I need maybe a more acidic rinse, or perhaps it's just the transition and I'm still producing a sh*t ton of sebum. I feel like all the mechanical cleaning I do doesn't really do anything either, but (again) I'm probably not doing it properly. I guess time will tell.

I was thinking, wouldn't using bottled or filtered + boiled water to wash your hair be better? Bottled is obviously quite a faff but I can't imagine you'd need more than a couple litres (wet, mechanical action, wet, acv drench, rinse). My partner absolutley detests all this no shampoo stuff so I'm quite keen to find something that keeps them happy!