Botanical Rituals No. 007: The Twice-Weekly Hair Oil

I first discovered Indian head massage decades ago, in a lunch hour near Oxford Circus. Two decades and a great deal of coconut oil later, I recently turned it into a proper twice-weekly ritual with my daughter. This is the story of how that started, and a proper look at which parts of what we now do are doing something measurable.

I used to work in central London, close to Oxford Circus, and near the office was a massage training school offering treatments at a fraction of the normal price, students needed people to practise on, and £10 for half an hour in the middle of a London workday felt like an outrageous bargain. That is where I first came across Indian head massage, taken during a lunch break, fully clothed, no oil involved because there was no time to wash and dry hair before going back to a desk. I went as often as I reasonably could.

What struck me almost immediately was not relaxation, though there was plenty of that too, but a genuine change in my hair. It felt different within weeks: more alive, somehow, with an obvious improvement in scalp circulation that I could feel as much as see. I started adding coconut oil into the technique myself at home shortly afterwards, then refined the blend gradually over the following years as I learned more and tried different combinations. That was a very long time ago now. I am fifty, and my hair is still thick, long and in genuinely good condition, which I do not think is a coincidence.

More recently, I finished a short, practical course on Indian head massage, mostly to formalise technique I had been doing instinctively for years, and turned the whole thing into a proper twice-weekly ritual, this time with my daughter alongside me. We both have very long hair, and it has quietly become one of our favourite things to do together. We usually make a pot of herbal tea first, sit down together while the oil goes in, and talk, properly, in the unhurried way that seems to happen far more easily when your hands are occupied with something else and there is no screen anywhere nearby. I hear about her week, her friends, whatever is currently occupying her twelve-year-old mind, in a relaxed, sideways way that a direct “how was your day” rarely manages on its own. If I am honest, that part of the ritual, the tea and the talking, has become at least as important to me as anything happening to either of our hair. The course itself was exactly what it promised: a practical, hands-on introduction to technique, not a deep dive into the underlying science. That is a perfectly reasonable thing for a short course to be, and I’d recommend it on those terms. But this Library exists partly to do the other half of that work, so I wanted to look properly at what our current oil blend is actually likely to be doing, oil by oil, rather than simply trusting that decades of personal experience and a long tradition of hair oiling must automatically mean every ingredient in it is earning its place.

What we’re currently using

Our base blend is coconut oil, castor oil and sweet almond oil, with rosemary essential oil added. It is worked through dry or towel-dried hair from scalp to ends, left in for around 30 to 40 minutes, and washed out, twice a week, on both of us. For my daughter, we wash the oil out using conditioner rather than shampoo, which is generally gentler on both her hair and her scalp and does a perfectly good job of emulsifying and removing the oil without the stronger surfactants in most shampoos.

The recipe, and how to try it yourself

That is the adult recipe: two parts coconut oil to two parts sweet almond oil to one part castor oil, which keeps the blend rich and slippery enough for a proper scalp massage without becoming too heavy to rinse out. Warm the carrier oils very gently before adding the rosemary, just enough to take the chill off, and massage it into the scalp first before working the rest through the lengths and ends, where hair is oldest and driest. A 2% dilution, around forty drops of rosemary essential oil per 100ml of the carrier blend above, is a reasonable, well within commonly used aromatherapy guidance for an adult scalp oil that is left in for a while and then washed out rather than left on the skin all day. If we add cedarwood and lavender as discussed above, the sensible approach is to keep the total essential oil content across all of them at roughly that same 2%, rather than adding each new oil at full strength on top of what is already there.

For technique, rather than ingredients, the course that started all of this for me is Indian Head Massage Certificate Course: A Practical Guide on Udemy. I enjoyed it and would recommend it on its own terms: it teaches the technique clearly and quickly, without going into the underlying science, which is exactly what this article exists to add.

The carrier oils: one clear winner, two reasonable companions

Of the three carrier oils, coconut oil has by far the best evidence behind it. A frequently cited comparative study measured protein loss from hair treated with coconut oil, mineral oil and sunflower oil, both before and after washing, and found that coconut oil reduced protein loss significantly more effectively than the other two, for both damaged and undamaged hair. Coconut oil’s fatty acid profile, dominated by lauric acid, allows it to penetrate the hair shaft rather than simply sitting on the surface, which is the most plausible explanation for that result. This matters because most of what reads as “shine” is really a smoother, less damaged cuticle reflecting light more evenly, and coconut oil is one of the few ingredients with reasonable evidence for actually doing that, rather than just feeling nice going on.

Castor oil and sweet almond oil are more traditional than they are proven. Castor oil’s reputation for thickening hair and accelerating growth is extremely widespread, but the direct clinical evidence for either claim is thin; its viscosity and ricinoleic acid content make it a plausible emollient and a very effective way to seal in moisture, which is a real, useful property, even without it living up to the more dramatic growth claims made for it. Sweet almond oil is a gentle, well-tolerated emollient rich in vitamin E, useful for softness and slip during a scalp massage, without needing to be dramatised into anything more than that. Neither ingredient needs to be a wonder oil to be worth including in a blend built around coconut oil’s genuine strengths.

Rosemary: the essential oil actually worth using

Rosemary is the one part of our current blend with real clinical evidence behind it, and it happens to be one of the better-supported essential oils in this entire category. A randomised trial compared rosemary oil against 2% topical minoxidil, a licensed pharmaceutical hair loss treatment, in people with androgenetic alopecia over six months, and found a comparable improvement in hair count between the two groups, with the rosemary group reporting notably less scalp itching as a side effect than the minoxidil group. One trial against an active comparator is not the same as a large body of confirmatory evidence, and it does not mean rosemary oil is interchangeable with minoxidil for everyone or every cause of hair thinning. But it is a genuinely well-designed piece of research, and it is more than most essential oils marketed for hair can claim.

What we’re adding next: cedarwood and lavender

Having looked at the evidence properly, we’re planning to add cedarwood atlas and lavender essential oils to the blend. The reasoning comes from a specific, genuinely well-designed study: a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial in patients with alopecia areata, in which one group massaged a blend of thyme, rosemary, lavender and cedarwood essential oils into their scalp in a jojoba and grapeseed carrier, while the control group massaged the plain carrier oils alone. After seven months, 44 per cent of the essential oil group showed improvement, compared with 15 per cent of the carrier-only group, a meaningful and statistically significant difference. We’re leaving thyme out for now, since it is a considerably stronger, more irritant oil than the other three and deserves more caution than a home routine used on a child’s scalp should involve. Cedarwood and lavender were both part of that effective blend, and both are comparatively gentle, well-tolerated oils, which makes them the sensible pair to add first.

A word on peppermint

Peppermint is a common suggestion for scalp oils, generally for the tingling, stimulating sensation it produces. That sensation is real, and it is a plausible reason to enjoy using it, but the evidence for peppermint oil and hair growth currently sits mostly in animal models, not human trials, so we are treating it as an optional, purely sensory addition rather than something we are confidently adding for a measurable effect. It is also a strong, cooling oil that needs a genuinely light hand, particularly on a child’s scalp, so if we do try it, it will be at a very low proportion of the total blend.

Doing this with a twelve-year-old

My daughter is twelve, and that changes the safety maths meaningfully compared with an adult routine, so this section matters more than any of the oil choices above. Children’s skin and scalps are generally more permeable and more reactive than adult skin, and dilution guidance for children is correspondingly more conservative than for adults; against the roughly 2% adult dilution described above, a sensible working figure for a child her age is around 1% or lower, and some oils are best avoided in children altogether regardless of dilution. We patch test any new essential oil on a small area of skin before it goes anywhere near her scalp, we keep the essential oil fraction of her oil noticeably lower than mine, and we treat any oil she reacts to, however mildly, as one we simply stop using rather than push through. None of this routine is a medical treatment, for either of us, and persistent scalp irritation, unusual hair loss or anything that looks like more than ordinary shedding deserves a proper assessment rather than a stronger oil blend.

What this ritual actually is

None of the above turns a twice-weekly hair oil into a clinical intervention, and that was never really the point. What the course actually gave us was a reason to sit down together twice a week, slow down, and pay attention to something ordinary: a pot of tea, a comb, a bowl of warm oil, and half an hour where the only thing either of us is meant to be doing is talking. I suspect I will remember those conversations considerably longer than I will remember the exact percentage of any essential oil in the blend, and that seems like exactly the right order of priorities. The fact that coconut oil and rosemary happen to have real evidence behind them is a genuinely nice bonus, not the reason we keep doing it. That distinction, between what a ritual demonstrably does and why it is actually worth doing, is one we try to hold onto throughout this Library, and it applies just as much to a pot of herbal tea and an ordinary Tuesday evening as it does to anything else we write about here.

Continue exploring

Doing this on yourself

Everything above assumes two people, since that is how we actually do it, but the scalp technique itself works perfectly well solo too. We have written up the actual self-massage technique properly, step by step, in a separate guide: How to Give Yourself an Indian Head Massage. Use it with this oil blend for the full twice-weekly ritual, or on its own, dry, for a five-minute reset on a day when the full version is not practical.

References

• Rele, A.S. & Mohile, R.B. (2003). Effect of mineral oil, sunflower oil, and coconut oil on prevention of hair damage. Journal of Cosmetic Science, 54(2), 175-192.
• Panahi, Y. et al. (2015). Rosemary oil vs minoxidil 2% for the treatment of androgenetic alopecia: a randomized comparative trial. Skinmed, 13(1), 15-21. PubMed 25842469
• Hay, I.C., Jamieson, M. & Ormerod, A.D. (1998). Randomized trial of aromatherapy: successful treatment for alopecia areata. Archives of Dermatology, 134(11), 1349-1352. doi:10.1001/archderm.134.11.1349
• Oh, J.Y. et al. (2014). Peppermint oil promotes hair growth without toxic signs. Toxicological Research, 30(4), 297-304. PMC4289931