My experinece with mother of vinegar
I have read about mother of vinegar, here, for a long time, but have
been keeping my scaling on scalp and face pretty much under control by
bathing with pyrithione zinc anti dandruff shampoo. But the last
couple years (after having a hard layer frozen off my nose by a
dermatologist) my nose, eyebrows and T zone has been getting slowly
harder to control.
Then, one day, I found "Bragg Apple Cider Vinegar With The ‘Mother’ at
a Martin’s grocery store. There was a layer of tan sludge at the
bottom, but I wanted to know that the mother was actually alive. So I
added about a teaspoon of the vinegar (shaken) to a cup or so of
burgandy wine (what I had at the time) in a pint water bottle.
Nothing seemed to be happening, but every day, I opened the bottle to
let fresh oxygen in and then shook the wine to oxygenate it (mother
consumes alcohol and converts it to acetic acid in an oxygen reaction).
After a month or so, I finally noticed a thin layer of purple gray
sludge settling at the bottom before the daily shake. I waited
another month and then tried dumping a quarter cup of this home made
vinegar (that I was pretty sure contained live mother) over my head,
after my normal washing, rubbed it around a bit and rinsed it off. I
was amazed the next day that my nose and eyebrows felt less flakey
than they had been for months. Even when I’m not flaking, I can
generally feel the edges of a layer at the last place where flakes
came off, but this time, the skin felt almost normal.
I used more the next night (last night) and today, my skin feels even
smoother. I don’t know if this effect will last, or if continued
relief will require continued exposure or not. But I am very
impressed with the change, in only a couple days.
I think I may get a big bottle of cheap white wine (may be the best
use for Chablis, but that is a matter of taste) and make another batch
that doesn’t make purple streaks on the walls of the shower. 
I also don’t don’t know whether or not there is enough live mother in
the original vinegar to make the additional fermentation worth the
trouble or not. But I am suspicious that it took a long time to see
anything happening, possibly because only a tiny fraction of the
sludge was alive when I started. Whereas I know that my vine vinegar
was made by living mother only a month or two old.