Are you trying to minimize the amount of liquids you pack in your carry-on? Do you tend to use the little bottles of hotel shampoo, but periodically find yourself staying at a budget motel that only provides bars of soap? One alternative is Travelon’s Shampoo Sheets.
If you’re familiar with dissolving soap sheets, these Shampoo Sheets will be a very familiar concept for you.
Soap sheets are basically wafer-thin sheets of soap. I don’t think they’re shaved soap so much a dried film of soapy liquid. Most of them dissolve as soon as you get some water on them, and they’ve been around for quite some time.
Travelon’s Shampoo Sheets
These Shampoo Sheets come in little plastic containers about the size of a roll of dental floss. Opening the flip-top reveals sheets of translucent film that, when put in contact with water, turn into a lather.
The biggest advantage to these Shampoo Sheets are that they are neither liquid nor gel; they contain no water whatsoever. So you can put it somewhere else in your bag and free up the space in your transparent toiletry bag for bottles of other items.
Caveats
You get 50 sheets per pack of Shampoo Sheets, but the instructions say to use between 1 and 6 sheets per shampoo. I currently have shoulder-length hair, and 1 sheet is wholly inadequate for even much of a lather. I think 1 sheet might work if you have a buzz cut. I tried three sheets at once and it was still a pretty lackluster lather. I would not recommend these as your primary shampoo, but as a back-up or when space is a premium, they should work fine.
Travelon also sells other types of sheets:
- Hand Soap Sheets
- Conditioner Sheets
- Shaving Sheets
- Body Wash Sheets
- Laundry Soap Sheets
Of these, I also tried the Conditioner Sheets—stay away from these! Because they are not soapy, they do not lather nor dissolve easily. The Conditioner Sheets remind me of the dried conditioner scum that collects around the mouth of a dispenser pump; and if you’re familiar with those, you know that those are very hard to rinse out. I wound up trying 4 sheets at once. They were difficult to dissolve, and I wound up with clumps in my hair that I couldn’t rinse out. I found little clumps stuck in my hair after I got out of the shower!
For the others, I don’t know if they’re partiuclarly helpful since the Laundry Soap Sheets will probably require quite a few to get any lather, and regular soap should work just as well instead of all of the specialized soap sheets.
Retail seems to be about $5.00, but you can purchase one here from PackingLight.com for $2.95 (despite its name it is not affiliated with Travelite).
I’m not a fan of hotel soaps and shampoos at all. In order to avoid the liquid soaps/shampoos/conditioners, I now get solids from Lush (there are stores and also online at lush.com). My personal faves are the Karma solid shampoo and Jungle conditioner bars. Easy to pack, without worrying about spills in the baggage!
Hey Mary, great to see you here!
I think I’ve visited a Lush store before… If I recall the soap bars were regular size? Do you know if they sell the bars in smaller (maybe half) sizes or if they will cut them smaller for you? A full bar of soap is luxuriant but it would take up a lot of precious space.
I’ll have to give those bars a try sometime–Thanks for the tip!
Hey Lani!
There’s a Lush store in Union Square and one at Valley Fair (for your Bay Area shopping convenience). There’s also one, I think, at Citywalk in LA. Check out Lush.com too. AVP told me there’s a Lush at the Orlando airport and they ship for free, but she told me that awhile ago.
The bars at Lush are broken out of a huge molded piece so you can get them in small, even teensy weensy, sizes. I have a few ‘sampler’ bars that would be ideal for travel! 🙂
Later!
Hi Lani,
Your blog is a great read. I have been thinking about shampoos etc for travelling light. Before our last trip we tried shampoo bars (like a bar of soap, but for your hair) but didn’t like the effect. I have since wondered whether you could use a dehydrator (like bushwalkers/trekkers use for their food) to dehydrate blobs of shampoo/conditioner/toothpaste? I wonder if they would reconstitute in a way that could be used properly? If they’re in single-serve sized blobs, you could use one each time as needed.
Has anyone tried this? Does it work?
Yvette
Hi Yvette — if you have a dehydrator, give it a try and let me know how it goes. You might need to line the shelf with plastic wrap, though.
If you want to just dehydrate it enough to where it’s much thicker, you might try using a little plastic food bowl or something, and keep an eye on it.
I did once try, many years ago, to see if I could get a more concentrated shampoo. I did it by trying to simmer some liquid shampoo. It didn’t turn out really well… if the temperature is too high and the liquid even simmers just a little, you wind up with a lot of bubbles. And the steam that it released had a very strong odor, and I was concerned that I might be actually releasing unhealthy gasses into the air.
They dont work that well at all. The dissolve very slowly. There is actually a powder that i have used too although it was itchy. Anyways, best of luck traveling all!-Jackie
I agree, Jackie. Personally, the best non-liquid shampoos I’ve found at the shampoo bars from Lush. They last forever, and work really well. They’re sold in full sizes though… but I’ve been able to chop them down to get them to fit in those little travel-sized tins of Altoids mints!