Hair – IT'S ALL IN MY HANDS

How to Formulate a Solid Shampoo

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Hello everyone! 🙂

Today I talk about how to formulate a Solid Shampoo.

This is NOT a natural soap, it is a Syndet (synthetic detergent) made with powder surfactants and other ingredients. A normal soap wouldn’t work well as a shampoo, no matter how many expensive oils one adds to it or how much love one puts into soap-making.
For it to be a decent solid shampoo, it must be a syndet. 😉

The advantages of a shampoo bar are that it is compact, it doesn’t weight much, it is easy to use, easy to carry around (on a plane for example)… Yet, it is not at all common to find one in the stores.

The reasons for this are many but here are the main ones:
A Solid Shampoo is made with an extremely high percentage of surfactant matter (55%-85%) and this makes the production costs fly very high as well.
But this is not all: a shampoo bar looks extremely similar to a simple and cheap soap and therefore people don’t give to it even the same value they give to, let’s say, a fancy bottle of liquid shampoo (even if the liquid shampoo costs way less, to produce, than the solid one).
These two things, combined, already don’t make for a winning product…

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No-Drandruff Shampoo DIY

Hello there!
I am back, finally, with a brand new recipe of a No-Dandruff Shampoo! 🙂
I wanted to try a new – to me, that is – ingredient: the SCLEROTIUM GUM! 🙂
I lowered the SLES to 23% because I needed a milder shampoo, but if you suffer of dandruff I think you should rise the SLES to 30% as we normally use it 🙂

That said, here a little explanation about the ingredients of this shampoo.
The ingredients which make this shampoo a “no-dandruff” one are two: Piroctone Olamine and Salicylic Acid.

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No SLES Shampoo DIY

Hello there! 🙂

I am back with a new, simple recipe for a shampoo without SLES (sodium laureth sulfate).

Just to make it clear: I am NOT against SLES in general (HERE you find a recipe of a SLES shampoo I posted a while ago). I still believe that the best shampoos include SLES (these shampoos have the best wetting ability, the best spreading ability, they feel great, they wash great: overall they give a satisfactory experience)… However this ingredient is not suitable for everyone, here the reasons why:

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Can you recognize a good Shampoo pt.4

Hello there! 😀

This is finally the last chapter of our “Recognizing a good Shampoo” topic.
We have learnt the basics of shampoo surfactants in the part 1 and part 2 and in the last post (which you can find here) we talked about the most common “extra ingredients”.
I know I haven’t covered all the possible things but I did what I could 😀

Today I just want to briefly talk about those “useful” ingredients which we find in our shampoos, meaning those ingredients which should (at least theoretically) make a difference! 😉

– Panthenol – It derives from Vitamin B5. A famous shampoo brand made a huge campaign on their shampoos because they contain this vitamin. Yes, it is supposed to have good effect on hair and scalp, it is an humectant and it helps retain the water. It also creates a light “film” on the hair protecting them from damage.
However, in a product like a shampoo, which we wash off after few seconds from having applied it, it might not be that effective and therefore if you find it in a shampoo it is very probably in minimal amount, just to look good in the ingredient’s list. 😉

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Can you recognize a good Shampoo? pt.3

So here we are, with the third part of our “Can you recognize a good Shampoo” posts! (you can check pt.1 and pt.2).

We have discussed the most commonly used surfactants; we know that usually anionic surfactants are the ones which perform the best on the hair because of their negative charge which makes them feel more “conditioning” (it actually increases their “wetting ability”) and at the same time, for the same reason, they tend to be more aggressive on our skin/scalp; we have also talked about the most commonly used eco-friendly and delicate surfactants (the glucosides); I know I am very far from having covered all the possible combination of surfactants, but that was not my intent from the beginning, as it would be an impossible task: surfactant combinations can be infinite! 😉

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Can you recognize a good shampoo? pt.2

Hello there!
Here we are at the second part of the “Can you recognize a good shampoo?”
We have learnt the basics of understanding a shampoo based on ANIONIC surfactants and, in the specific, based on the combination SLES and Cocamidopropyl Betaine, but there is so much more we need to learn! 😀

So today we learn about another surfactant-combination we easily find in shampoos: combination of glucosides!

The glucosides are a wide variety of NON-IONIC (this means they don’t have “electric charge”) surfactants which are usually easily biodegradable; therefore many bio-shampoos contain this combination of surfactants.
The most common glucosides which you will find in an INCI are: Lauryl Glucoside, Decyl Glucoside, Coco Glucoside, and Caprylyl/Capric Glucoside.

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Two Phase Leave-in Hair Conditioner – Recipe

Hello there!

This is a very simple recipe for a Two Phase Leave-in Hair Conditioner!

The prince ingredient here is Cetrimonium Chloride!
As you know this is a cationic surfactant with very high conditioning properties.

This Hair Conditioner is formulated for my hair-type: long and very thin, they tangle easily and they grease easily (so I added close to no grease to not make my hair get heavy).

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