Know What You're Putting On Your Hair?

The colorful bottles standing at attention on the shelves in the hair care aisle bristle with promise, don't they?  In that they all promise you something if you'll but give them a chance.  Some promise cleaner hair.  Others shinier hair.  Others still say they'll make your crowing glory more manageable in one way or another.

Still, given many of these bottles contain mostly water how likely is it they can seriously enhance the look of your flowing locks?  Not to mention the effect the mysterious sounding ingredients listed on the label can have on your hair - good or bad. 

Those selling these products, and that would include your neighborhood stylist, insist that today's hair care products are better than they ever have been. They work more reliably, do so with fewer harsh chemicals plus most do what they say they will. 

Salon chatter aside, you can still get caught up in the upsell hype and pay too much for a salon product when there's a perfectly good equivalent waiting for you at the drug store.  How do you avoid that costly mistake?  And how can you really know for sure what you're putting on your hair? 

Well, instead of downing ice cream by the quart worrying about it, let's see if we can't shed some light on the subject.

Basically you can pigeon hole most hair care products into three broad categories.  There are cleansers.  There are conditioners.  And there are the so called after care or finishing products. 

The number of products in each category has exploded over the years.  In part because we've gone from washing our hair maybe once a week back in your parents' day to where most guys lather up daily.  And the typical gal will shampoo her hair roughly every other day. 

Combine this more frequent washing will all the coloring, perming and straightening going on and you can see why there has been a proliferation of products to counteract all the damage being inflicted on our hair.  Not to mention the effect flat irons, curling irons and hair dryers are having on your mane.

Yet when you get right down to it, all conditioners and shampoos pretty much follow the same witches brew.  Were you to check out the recipes, errrrr I mean formulations, you'd basically see all have got your cleaners, your lathering agents, fragrances and preservatives all mixed together in varying amounts. 

Yet do you really need to be adding things like cyclopentasiloxane, glycerol stearate, cocamidopropyl, ethylparaben to your tresses? 

Well the first one allegedly smoothes your hair. 

The second is an emulsifier that keeps all the ingredients mixed together.

The third is a detergent. 

And the fourth chemical is a preservative that deters the growth of bacteria. 

Now don't you wish you had paid more attention during high school chemistry class?  Suffice it to say some ingredients are critical to great looking hair and others not so much.  But they do help with the marketing of the product.

Yet all this may not matter.  You simply want results.  You want the product to do what it promises.  And to be honest I really can't help you there with specifics or recommendations.  At least not in a brief overview of what hair care products do or do not contain.  Besides it would be kinda silly not knowing your tresses the way you know then.

Okay so these products may not improve your love life as the ads suggest but you still want to know that others are watching.  Casting admiring glances.  Some envious ones too.  All the while wondering what they can do to have hair that looks as great as yours.  And if you can pull that off, it may not really matter what you're putting on your hair.  Am I right? Of course I am.