Chinese astronaut Wang Yaping spent six months aboard the nation’s Tianhe space station module. As you can imagine, keeping her hair clean in microgravity was a part of her stay. In the video below, Yaping demonstrates how astronauts wash their hair in space.
“First, I put the special shampoo on my hair, and you can see the shampoo is foamy. It’s not easy to wash hair in space. After squeezing water on my head, I need to put on the towel gloves to absorb the water on my hair. Finally, I put on this hair towel and wait for my hair to dry.”
As shown in the video below, Yaping squeezes a foamy shampoo from a tube throughout her hair. She works the shampoo into her hair with her fingers. She then takes a tube of water and squeezes out tiny amounts around her head (watch some of the water droplets float away in the video). She then dons white “towel gloves” and again works her fingers thoroughly through her hair. Finally, she ties on a hair towel and waits for her hair to completely dry.
The process is of course, time-consuming, but gets the job done quite well. Check out the entire process of washing your hair in space in the video below.