Today we have some amazing tips on how to choose the best natural hair products for your hair type. Are you looking to start a new hair health regimen? Well, if that’s the case and you’re unsatisfied with past results, you should consider switching to natural hair products. However, just because a product is natural, doesn’t mean it can’t be bad for you.
In order to get your hair to optimal health, you need to learn how to choose the best possible product for your hair type. So if that sounds like something you would like to know, keep reading to find out.
Read the Ingredients Label Deliberately
The first step to choosing a natural hair product is to read the ingredients label deliberately. For shampoos and conditioners, you must understand the first five on the list. For instance, the water content of the shampoo and conditioner might vary from one company to another, but it should range anywhere from 50% to 80% of the entire weight.
If you buy a shampoo or conditioner who’s list does not start with water, you should be cautious. Check with the manufacturer, and ask them about this, ensure that the list is accurate. As you examine the label on the natural hair products, it’s very likely that the majority of it is just water. Thus, there is not a lot of wiggle room to add a variety of other things.
This is where marketing becomes the potentiated ploy for the hair care brand. Attractive labels have been created that claim the product consists of an essential blend of various oils and herbs, which make your hair look stunning. In this case, only a couple of drops and a finger-lick of the herb has been added to keep their word.
Often, when you search for the oil on the list that has convinced you to buy the product, you will be surprised to see that it is somewhere at the bottom of the list, next to all of the other irrelevant ingredients added for marketing purposes. In conclusion, the first five/six ingredients of the product are those that will have the most impact on your hair.
Should You Read Beyond the First Five Ingredients?
Of course, if you happen to have allergies to specific oils, or you’re trying to avoid sulfates, silicone, and whatever else, then it is paramount that you read the entire list.
However, it’s not necessary to research each ingredient of the list. But glancing at it to determine if there are ingredients that you want to avoid is a good idea. After you’ve done that, go back to the first five and really concentrate on those.
But if you don’t care too much about ingredients, consider supplements for hair which will mitigate any bad side-effects caused by unnecessary additives in hair products.
Can a Label Have Hidden Ingredients?
In order for a brand to omit ingredients from a label, the FDA has to approve of the omission. The process has to be determined as a “trade secret“, as mentioned in the FDA guidelines.
In most cases, the FDA will not agree to exclude commonly-used formulations (oil mixes) or items that might have an allergy concern associated with them. It’s a valid concern, nonetheless.
If you were to look through the hair products on sale at your local beauty store, it would be very hard for you to find a product that has a “trade secret” ingredient on the list. So even though hidden ingredients can exist, they most likely don’t.
How to Select Natural Moisturizing Shampoos
When choosing a natural moisturizing shampoo, you should look out for products that don’t have sodium lauryl sulfate or ammonium lauryl sulfate, which are used to aid foaming. Your shampoo should be gentle enough for consistent use. It’s recommended to acclimate your hair to it over a course of a month at shampooing twice per week.
As you begin to learn more about your hair, you might find that this product is more or less appropriate for you. Many brands now create products that are SLS-free or ALS-free, which means they don’t contain the sulfates mentioned earlier. You want to avoid them for many reasons. But most importantly because they strip your hair of natural oils, boosting your system into overexertion for producing recovery oil.
Typically, a shampoo that has lots of sulfates will not be too moisturizing. Since moisture is important, avoiding sulfates is a great start. The specific ingredients to avoid are beyond the scope of this article, so you will need to do some deliberate research.
When you include the ingenuity and scheme practices of brands with respect to ingredient labels, figuring out if something is true is quite difficult. Nonetheless, avoiding sulfates is a great start.
How to Select Natural Hair Products: Conditioners
When you want to infuse moisture or some protein into your strands of hair, you will most likely have to employ the use of a conditioner. In general, a conditioner will provide temporary relief for your cosmetic aesthetic of hair that is dry or damaged. Thus, it’s important to consider the obvious limitations that conditioners have, and that they cannot mend hair from the ground up. Conditioners are appropriately categorized into three: leave-in conditioners, rinse-out conditioners, and deep conditioners.
A leave-in conditioner is used after you have washed your hair, and it is applied to the hair and not rinsed out. It can either come in a dry or liquid form.
A rinse-out conditioner is a product that you work through towel-dry hair, and then rinse out after a short while.
A deep conditioner is one that penetrates the strands with proteins and is often utilized through a heat-sealing process. But adding heat to a regular conditioner will not make it a deep conditioner.
Any conditioner that you use should be moisturizing in nature. A deep, protein-based conditioner should only be used on an as-needed regime. When selecting the conditioner, you should avoid silicones and cones. As they are responsible for dry hair, which means the moisturizing effect of the product has been mitigated in the long-term.
Because listing each ingredient that you should avoid is ineffective, there are some general guidelines that you can follow. When choosing your moisturizing deep conditioner, the ingredients should consist of water, humectants, and fatty alcohols. Anything else that coats the hair strand should be avoided like the plague.
How to Select Protein Treatments
A protein treatment will vary brand by brand, thus you must read the instructions on the label and follow them. Misuse can do more harm than good because the hair is about 70% keratin protein.
An appropriate amount of protein will reinforce and strengthen the hair shaft, whereas excessive amounts will do the opposite. A protein hair treatment will ensure that your hairs can fight against breakage, which means you get to experience a fuller and stronger head of hair.
How often you will be using the treatment should depend on the degree of damage that you are trying to mend. And the amount of protein will be variable for every person. To gauge the appropriate dosage, one has to experiment, but the bottom line is that you should use protein-based treatments on an as-needed basis.
The goal is to really understand your hair, what it wants, what it needs, and how you can deliver the two without compromising its integrity.
How to Select Oil & Butters
You’ve gathered that the primary theme of hair care is moisturization, and one of the best ways to achieve this state is via oils and butter. While it is important to use water-based products, such as shampoos and conditioners, oil and butter are paramount to your overall hair health, because it is capable of sealing moisture into strands themselves.
When choosing an oil or butter, you can’t really go wrong. However, it’s recommended that you find an organic, cold-pressed product – so that you get the best nourishment from the extraction process.
Another important thing to consider is the comedogenic profile of the oil because you don’t want to seal all of your pores on the scalp. If you don’t care about that, just apply the oil to the ends, so that you avoid the scalp altogether.
Your Hair, Your Choice
Now that you know how to choose natural hair products, you are well on your way to taking your hair to the next level. After all, it’s your hair, so it might as well be your choice. The aesthetic and health of your hair will be entirely dependent on your knowledge and patience when it comes to researching and experiment with various hair products.
So good luck. If you’re interested in similar beauty-related topics, go to one of our featured categories at the top.
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