Fair warning, what follows is somewhat gross. Hopefully it is at least somewhat entertaining though, and will give you a little snapshot of the everyday trials of parenting a baby, and if you have a flaky-head baby of your own you're responsible for, maybe it will help you.

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When my first kid was first born, we didn't really do much about the flaky bits on her scalp that people call "cradle cap". When we gave her a bath, we had a little soft brush that we would dutifully rub to try to flake some off, but it didn't work that well. But I knew that the cradle cap was mostly cosmetic and didn't bother her or indicate a health problem, so I didn't fuss over it much. It stayed there, big soft flakes on her head, for much longer than internet experts suggested it likely would without intervention. Less noticeable after a bath, but then it'd come back every time, for 6 or 9 months.

When my second kid was born, I was more annoyed about the cradle cap, even though same as before, it's really just cosmetic. So around 3 months of age when it had yet to disappear or reduce in any meaningful way, I decided to try some of the more advanced remedies beyond the soft scrubber in the bath that I found suggested on the internet.

One piece of advice I found was to slather the baby's head in vaseline or mineral oil, let it sit for a while, then wash it out, scrubbing softly with that soft scrubby brush. We didn't have mineral oil, so I tried vaseline. Vaseline, you may recall, is a clear greasy sludge. But I dutifully slathered it on my baby's head and let it sit for a couple hours as we went on with the rest of our day. Then we headed to the bath.

I soaped up the baby's little noggin with the baby soap, and scrubbed with the little soft scrubby brush we got with the cradle cap set. And... there was so much vaseline and it was not budging, at all. The baby's head stayed greasy. So greasy. I did a few more rounds of rinsing and repeating, like all the shampoo bottles of my life have told me I might want to do, but the grease remained.

I took the baby out of the bath and pondered my next move. What do people do about greasy soft fragile beings?? Well, baby ducks who've survived an oil spill get greasy, according to some commercials I've seen, and they are pretty soft and small. They use dish soap for that? We had dish soap. So back to the bath, and I tried a few rounds of scrubbing and rinsing with the name-brand dish soap from the kitchen sink, being extra careful to not rinse towards baby's eyes.

Was my baby's head no longer greasy, like a freshly washed baby bird ready to return to nature after a traumatic man-made disaster? No. It was still so greasy. And it was getting late.

Some people on the internet also said that a zinc oxide-based diaper cream might help with cradle cap. I didn't try that first because it sounded really messy, but uh, see results above with vaseline, and now we were headed straight to bedtime with a very greasy baby head anyways, so why not?

So I grabbed our tube of baby butt paste, which has the texture of a mineral sunblock if the sunblock was very thick and stiff instead of runny. I have heard it said that the proper application of this kind of diaper cream to put on irritated booty is to, ahem, apply it like frosting on a cinnamon roll, which is a more apt metaphor texturally than you might truly want it to be. If you have been shaking your head at why "young parents these days" have taken to applying butt paste with a dedicated paste-spreading spatula rather than using their hands, this textural change (that our own parents, shaking the container of now passé powder, probably did not experience) is why.

I did not use the spatula to spread the zinc oxide cream on my baby's head, just my hands. I turned his scalp into a little white cue ball, then off he went to bed for the night.

The next morning it was time for a bath, again. We returned to the baby bath. This time I started with the scrubber, then used a little fine-toothed comb. Because the cradle cap flakes? They were coming off! Oh wow, were they coming off. But now they were glued to my baby's hair by thick paste & the previous layer of still-present vaseline. So I used the comb to work out the nasty bits, and then did multiple rounds of baby shampoo and then a couple of dish soap, followed by another baby shampoo and rinse, and then finally, finally, the baby's head was clean again.

And after all that work, it turns out: it actually worked! It's been a few months now and the cradle cap has not actually come back.

Anyways - to all the online advice givers (including somewhat official sources on baby health & care) and even actual doctors our babies have seen for primary care who said "oh don't worry, the cradle cap will clear up on its own within a few weeks" or "just scrub it during the bath, it will be gone in no time", you were wrong actually, and much higher intervention levels turned out to be needed. But once we did those, our flaky head baby days were truly over. Good riddance.