Aveda Dry Remedy Moisturizing Conditioner

I almost recommended it. Well, okay, I sort of did recommend it for a few days before too many things began to bother me. And I have to admit I was intrigued by it. I also had conflicting feelings about trying this conditioner. I've been wanting to add more variety to what I recommend on the site, but Aveda conditioners are so darn expensive. And I feel that they have basically the same working ingredients for your hair as less expensive brands—they simply throw in lots of exotic-sounding plant-water to sell it.

This is where my issues started to nag at me. It began to bother me that this product has several ingredients with very little objective information available on them. I hadn't heard anything bad about these mystery ingredients, necessarily. It's just that I like to read, from at least one unbiased source, what the function of each ingredient is. One ingredient in particular really got to me: Palmamidopropyl Trimonium Methosulfate. I spent hours trying to track this down. I mean, how can there be no references to this anywhere, not in any of my books on ingredients, nor online, except in listings of Aveda ingredients. How did Aveda get any information on this ingredient to use it in the first place, then? I tried lots of variations of it's name (sometimes companies like to change the way an ingredient is listed on their label by adding spaces, leaving off part of it and such). But no such luck. In desperation/ frustration, I even called Aveda (and if you knew how much I hate talking on the phone, you'd know this was quite a drastic action on my part). I asked the customer service representative if she might know of any objective source that would tell me what this ingredient did. Though very nice, instead of giving me an objective source for this ingredient's information, she simply told me the ingredient was "a conditioning agent". But if you think about it, it's not like she would tell me if this were a crappy ingredient in their product.

But I do like how environmentally conscious the company seems. And I want to recommend more products that work, so I tried it anyway. The combing was amazing. I tell you, it combs like a dream. This would be the conditioner to use if your hair is matting. (However, it dries very light, and isn't as moisturizing as other conditioners, so this might be best for hair that doesn't need as much weight and definition or moisture. Perfect for tangles, though. You can also wait for your curls to dry and smooth a bit more on the ends to keep them together. This would also be a good candidate for adding a little olive oil or jojoba oil in the bottle (about a teaspoon and shaking it hard) to make it more moisturizing.)

At first the scent caught me by surprise. I was expecting it to be sweet, but it smelled more like a bitter sap, and I didn't like it. Although, once it dried, the scent grew on me. It began to smell more like frankincense or myrrh, or another warm, smoky scent. Now (I say grudgingly) it may be one of my favorite scents. It may not be for everyone, though.

But those mystery ingredients started getting to me. Usually I gloss over the extracts. Extracts are in hair care products for show. They are so diluted by the time they are put in the product, and then they are in there in such teeny amounts that they are nearly non-existent. And what are they really going to do for hair anyway? Hair isn't alive, so it can't use vitamins and minerals and antioxidents. And if the extract or exotic oil is being marketed as moisturizing, simple olive, coconut, or jojoba oil would do the trick. And on top of that, if the extracts did have a function, the product would have to be labeled as a drug.

Then, as the last straw, I saw two extracts the bugged me. The first was styrax, which may be a resin, which means it could harden on the hair. However, I didn't see that concern mentioned in any of my books, and it's mostly used as a fragrance anyway. And it's low on the ingredients list, so it may be okay. But then...then I saw it had tomato extract. Not just of the fruit, which, though totally pointless in a hair-care product, is harmless. But then the label said it included the leaf and stem extracts—and those are toxic! (As are the leaves of potatoes, by the way. They are both in the Nightshade (Solanaceae) family). What on earth is that doing in there?! So that was it.

Grumbling and fussing, I pulled the conditioner off the site.

*Note: I understand that this product (as are nearly all the conditioners I review) is meant to be rinsed out. And there are plenty of wonderful reviews for how this product works when it's rinsed out. However, since my method involves leaving the product in our hair, I review how a product functions this way.

Citre Shine Colour Prism: It snuck in

I am moving this week and next, so I thought I should probably talk about this product before it got packed away and I didn't see it for months to take its mug shot.

I'm always looking for good conditioners to comb my hair with. My favorite thing to do is find little gems in drugstores that have nearly identical functioning ingredients as more expensive brands. I then happily take my new discovery back home like a squirrel that has just found a giant acorn.

A while back I found Citré Shine Colour Prism Conditioner. On the bottle, it says it contains "Multi-Reflective Illumination", and "Citrus Prismatic Waxes" and I imagined combing into my hair a slippery, sparkly cream that (hopefully) shimmered slightly when dry. Perhaps the images of shimmery hair danced before my eyes, and blinded me on my first scan of the ingredients in the store. I usually scan a product twice before I buy it, looking for any ingredients I know to be bad. If I don't see any (well, or notice any), I then go home and research any additional ingredients I'm not familiar with before it even touches my hair.

Almost all the ingredients on the long list on the back were familiar, and there were even many conditioning ones in there. It wasn't until I got it home and was looking it over again that I saw this one had three ingredients I consider bad for the hair: isopropyl alcohol, zinc chloride and styrene/acrylamide copolymer.

Isopropyl alcohol is an easy one. I just overlooked it. It's known to be very drying to the hair. What it's doing in a conditioner is beyond me. I mean, I know it's only in there by a very tiny amount, but still...(I guess I really was blinded by the hope there were shimmery prismatic waxes in there).

The second ingredient was trickier: zinc chloride. I had to do some research. But from what I've found so far, it looks awful. Every scientific site that mentioned it had a big CORROSIVE listed for this product, saying it dissolves fibers including skin, and even some metals, apparently. If this wasn't bad enough, it also does terrible environmental things when it's put in water. Again, I know it's in there in tiny amounts, but why they would put something like this in a product at all is odd.

The third ingredient, styrene/acrylamide copolymer, and I go way back:

You see, long ago when I was still a teen, when I was trying to learn what to do with my hair, I thought I'd found the perfect products. I loved this particular orange colored shampoo and conditioner, and faithfully used them every week. This was back in the days when I thoroughly rinsed out my conditioners, and then used some kind of hair dressing to moisturize. So imagine my horror when I was doing my hair for school one morning, and found that it was sticky! My fingers actually stuck to my hair. And of course I couldn't leave it alone. I had to keep pressing my hair between my fingers, getting more upset as my fingers got stickier. School papers stuck to my hands like I was Spider Woman.

Being the easily mortified teenage girl that I was, I had a dramatically bad day, until one of my teachers pulled me aside and asked what was wrong. I told her about my sticky hair, and she told me about product build up. Needless to say, I never used that brand again. Unfortunately, I had no idea what ingredients in the products caused the build up.

Now that I know ingredients, I know which ones get crunchy or sticky. And styrene/acrylamide copolymer is one of them. This ingredient is often found in hair gels, and it's one of the things that gives gels their hold. Now I know you are supposed to rotate products so this doesn't happen, and I do rotate them. But since I leave in my conditioners, I don't need all that stickiness in my hair, ever. Plus, you need stronger cleansers to remove sticky/ crunchy ingredients than you would with a product without them. I won't say that this ingredient would hurt your hair unless it really built up on there. If you want a little hold, a product with them in it is perfect for you. But after my sticky-note hair incident, I am staying away from it.

So alas, with a sigh I have to pass on this juicy conditioner, with its promise of shimmer, because I am paranoid. That and I hate having hair that can double as fly paper (along with a few other issues).

*Note: I understand that this product (as are nearly all the conditioners I review) is meant to be rinsed out. And there are plenty of wonderful reviews for how this product works when it's rinsed out. However, since my method involves leaving the product in our hair, I review how a product functions this way.

Alba Botanica gardenia hydrating hair conditioner

When I left off last post...

I had found the Alba Botanica coconut milk extra-rich conditioner to be not only drying, but when I added enough product to clump my curls, it got flaky. I wanted to see if it was the guar hydroxypropyltrimonium chloride that was causing this. So I decided to try Alba Botanica gardenia hydrating hair conditioner, which had nearly identical ingredients, except that it was missing the guar hydroxypropyltrimonim chloride.

So a few weeks later, I tried the Alba Botanica gardenia hydrating conditioner. Just like the coconut milk version, things started out fine. The combing was nice, and it clumped okay. It was a bit light, and when my hair dried, I added more product to my ends. And sure enough, this time it didn't flake or glob! So I knew that guar hydroxypropyltrimonium chloride, though a fine ingredient for a product you will rinse-out (as far as I've been able to find), was not ideal for a product you were going to leave in your hair. This was fair.

Now the real test: was this ingredient also to blame for my hair feeling dry? Or because it was included in the ingredients, I wasn't able to use enough product to keep my ends together, and that just made them feel dry? Or was/were there other ingredient(s) lurking in there that caused the dryness and matting?

As the days wore on with the gardenia conditioner, my hair felt dryer. I'd put a generous amount on my ends, but when the product dried, they felt even dryer. Not good. By the end of the week, it seemed like I had little matted areas in my hair.

At the end of the trial week, when it was time to wash and re-comb my hair, I decided to comb with a stand-by very slippery conditioner, and used Paula's Choice Smooth Finish Conditioner. To my surprise, my hair took even longer than the usual two hours to comb and smooth. It was really matted. I grumbled to my guy, Jon, about how long it was taking me to get through my hair, and he said he'd noticed my hair had looked sort of matted this week. So that decided it. There was something in those products that was drying, and I needed to find out what it was! This way I could avoid it in future products and save my money.

During that time I was doing some reading and stumbled upon a mention that pineapple was drying (per Don't Go Shopping Without Me by Paula Begoun, pg 352), mostly because it has the enzyme bromelain in it. I know when I eat lots of pineapple, my tongue gets really raw. It's mostly from the the acidity, but also the enzyme action. So I checked back over the ingredients in both bottles of Alba conditioner, and saw that they not only had pineapple, but papaya as well (a source of the potent enzyme papain). I'm thinking this product is pH balanced (it says it is on the bottle—though I haven't used litmus paper on it to make sure)— so it's probably the enzymes in those two ingredients that made my hair dry and matted, not the acidity.

However, these two conditioners also have citric acid, which puzzles me: Citric acid is used to balance the pH in products that may be too alkaline by making them more acidic. Hmmm. I think I will get some litmus paper. If I find out anything, I'll post again about the results.

So from what I can tell, the pineapple and papaya were mildly exfoliating my hair, which was what was causing it to feel so dry. So now I know to avoid them in future products.

I do want to say I use Alba's cocoa butter hand & body lotion and am happy with it. It's just that products have to go through a much more rigorous process when it comes to my hair. I'm much easier going when it comes to lotion for my skin than for my hair.

*Note: I understand that this product (as are nearly all the conditioners I review) is meant to be rinsed out. And there are plenty of wonderful reviews for how this product works when it's rinsed out. However, since my method involves leaving the product in our hair, I review how a product functions this way.