5 Shampoo Ingredients That Are Bad For Your Hair – and You
When you pick up a shampoo from the supermarket shelf, it is usually because you expect it to do good things for your hair, whether that is to moisturise it, make it shiny, more manageable and of course, clean it. Shampoo is made up of many different ingredients – the trouble is that most people don’t fully understand what those ingredients do, whether they are safe and why they are put into the shampoo to start with. If you are having trouble with your hair, or if your scalp feels itchy or irritable, it could be some of the ingredients in your shampoo that are at fault. Here are 5 shampoo ingredients to avoid.
- Silicone – this is put into some shampoo to make the hair shinier. The only trouble is it is not water soluble so it builds up over time, especially around the shaft of the hair. This causes the hair to feel greasy and weighed down, especially if it is fine hair. The sulphate in shampoo is put in to help dissolve the silicone, but that ingredient is best avoided.
- Sulphate – you’ll see this as sodium lauryl sulphate or laureth sulphates. They are used to create that nice, frothy lather that everyone likes. However, they do more than that. These are one of the most irritating compounds anyone could put on their skin and they are very drying as well. Worse still, they are a proven carcinogen that is absorbed easily into the skin and the bloodstream. And people wonder why cancer is such an epidemic these days.