5 Hair Product Ingredients You Should Avoid

With so many haircare products that you use daily, it certainly won’t hurt to be more aware of the ingredients that you’re putting on your body. Whether they’re causing hair breakage or is threatening to compromise your health, these five ingredients will give a good start in your ‘must-avoid-haircare-ingredients’ list.

1. Silicone. Silicone – often listed as cyclomethicone and dimethicone – isn’t quite an enemy of a healthy hair, but the problem is that silicone doesn’t offer any long-term benefit at all. Sure, it coats the strands to make them appear shinier and smoother, but over time they build up on the hair’s shaft, resulting to greasy and weighed-down roots. This is why it’s better to avoid products with silicone altogether.

2. Proteins. Unlike the other ingredients on the list, protein itself isn’t bad for your hair, but having too much of a good thing can still result to something awful. Protein helps in strengthening the cuticles of your hair, but using too much of it can throw of your strand’s natural moisture balance, resulting to breakage and damage. To avoid this, alternate between your protein strengthening and moisturizing products. This will help in maintaining your hair’s balance, while avoiding over-moisturizing as well.

3. Synthetic Fragrance. Avoiding synthetic fragrance doesn’t mean that you’ll be restricted to fragrance-free hair products. However, it does mean that you should look for and use products that are scented naturally with extracts and essential oils. This is especially important if you have sensitive skin, since certain fragrances can be wildly irritating to the skin and an itchy scalp has never look appealing to anyone ever.

4. Isopropyl Alcohol. Seeing some form of alcohol in a beauty product’s ingredient list isn’t surprising, but isopropyl alcohol is definitely one of the alcohol types that you should make conscious effort to avoid. Because not only is it highly inflammable and toxic when inhaled, it also zaps the moisture out of your strands, causing a major drying effect on your hair. Definitely something that you wouldn’t want to put on your hair.

5. Sodium Lauryl Sulphate. Laureth sulphates and sodium lauryl are two of the nastiest and most irritating compounds that you could apply to your skin. Not only are they believed to be extremely drying for the skin, they’re also proven carcinogens that can penetrate the skin and get absorbed into the bloodstream. So do take a hard pass on this ingredient.

With the access to the Internet nowadays, knowing the beauty product ingredients that you should avoid has become easier. So do take a good look on your favourite product’s ingredients list and when you see any of the aforementioned chemicals in them, don’t hesitate to ditch the product and look for a safer alternative.