Healthy Hair Shampoo Can be Found
Healthy hair shampoo is a must!
Every one wants healthy hair and a healthy hair shampoo is undoubtedly one part of the jigsaw.
Healthy Hair - How to Have Healthy Hair?
There are many products on the market claiming to give our hair a healthy look, claiming to balance the acid/alkaline properties of our scalps and generally promising the earth!
Some of them practically cost the earth too.
Some ads even imply their product will make our hair healthy.
So what's the truth?
Baloney?
What do we need for healthy hair and how can we find a healthy hair shampoo? What are natural hair care products and how do we find them? Is organic hair care worth pursuing? How safe is the average hair treatment product?
There is a fair amount of baloney in many of the claims made by hair shampoo companies.
Many independent studies have shown, time and again that the more expensive products are not necessarily better for us than many of the cheaper ones. (Nor do they necessarily perform better: in blind testing, relatively cheap drug store shampoos like Clairol Herbal Essences are shown to clean just as well as many expensive salon brands.)
(Note: Clairol still uses animal testing for some cosmetics, I believe, though they have stopped using it on Herbal Essences - info from PETA)
Health concerns - and the environment
Some of the ingredients used in many products, both expensive and cheap, are suspect from a health viewpoint.
Not only are many these products not particularly good for us, the chemicals involved may even be damaging to the environment. Certainly, a lot of the packaging used for many of these products is contributing to landfill sites!
Manufacturing processes often place stresses on the local and wider environments too - and every large factory is undoubtedly contributing to greenhouse gases to some extent.
So lets have a look at some of the ingredients and assess what they can do for us and what they may do to the environment.
What is shampoo?
Healthy Hair Shampoo:
Clearly we all want to be able to wash our hair safely and effectively. The point of shampoo is to remove dirt such as dead skin, and sebum - naturally occurring oils - and also the build up of residues from other hair products.
If you live in an urban environment you may also need to wash out some of the accumulated dirt and pollution of the average city environment, so washing your hair regularly is a must.
Here are the main ingredients found in shampoos
Sodium laureth sulphate (SLES) and/or sodium lauryl sulphate (SLS) or ammonium lauryl sulphate and ammonium laureth sulfate. These are the cleansing agents and can often be found in lots of other cleaning products.
They are classed as surfactants. Their job is to dissolve and loosen dirt into a suspension which can then be rinsed away. They are also responsible for the lather which most shampoos create when you put them on your hai...
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