Silicones, Sulfates and Choosing the right Products for your hair.

As a stylist and salon owner I get to talk and interact with a lot of naturalistas about their hair journey, hair products and hair health. The one thing I have noticed time and time again is that a lot of people are fixated on 'Sulfate Free Shampoos'. They go natural, read up that sulfates are bad for your hair and then invest in sulfate free shampoos - which in and of itself is a great thing.

HOWEVER they begin to suffer from bad breakage, hair starts to thin and even though they seem to be doing the right things and using the 'right' products, their hair is not co operating! Most times when I hear this complaint, the first thing I ask is the name of the deep/leave in conditioner they are using and when you look at the ingredients you notice they have silicones and mineral oil high up on the list.

The thing is while sulfate free shampoos are great for natural hair as they are non stripping, a lot of silicones and other ingredients are non water soluble and can only be removed from your hair using a sulfate shampoo. The continued layering of these products on your hair without washing them out properly will cause build up on  your strands, no moisture will penetrate through and you begin to experience breakage as the hair becomes brittle from lack of penetrative moisture. This is why you will notice most brands that produce 'sets' will have sulfates in their shampoos where they have silicone rich conditioners.

Before we go any further, lets discuss what Silicones are, what they do for the hair and the type of silicones we have.

Silicone's And Sulfates - To Be Or Not To Be?

When I started my healthy hair journey, I spent fascinated hour upon hour, reading through as many hair forums and blogs that I could find (I still do) learning about products, ingredients and other people’s experiences before quickly running to the store to buy some product which was ‘good’ or running to my bathroom to bin some product which was ‘bad’ – safe to say I was a bandwagon jumper and had to learn the hard way when I started losing hair.

*Hair tip - Try not to jump on every hair bandwagon that comes up; apart from getting dizzy with confusion, your hair might just give you an 'askor' and refuse to respond to products or worse still, start breaking off*

Case in point:

‘Sulfate free shampoos are a gentler way to cleanse your hair as they don’t strip your strands and dry out your hair the way shampoos with sulfates will’. 

This was something I saw on every blog and immediately invested in some sulfate free shampoos. Now prior to this, I had fallen in love with the Neutrogena Triple Moisture Silk Touch Leave In Cream as it made my hair oh so soft and silky! I was co washing quite often (with the Aussie Moist Moisturizing conditioner which I adore) and also using the leave – in quite often while shampooing less often with a sulfate free shampoo.