What can conditioners really do for your hair?
All the conditioners and most shampoos that exist on the market today, no matter where you buy them, are based on two principles in hair care. These two principles were developed into a product in Europe right after the second world war and are still used as the main way to keep the hair " healthy looking ", notice: not healthy, but only "looking healthy ".Now there's a point that has to be made so you can understand, how old fashioned the conditioners are: man has been on the moon, but the hair is still treated the same way as some sixty years ago. During this same time more and more effective chemicals such popular ones as high lights, bleaches, relaxers and perms which destroy and remove from the hair its natural elements, have been invented, but nothing that would put those lacking elements back into the hair.
The two principles mentioned earlier, which the conditioners are based upon, are:
1] The acidity: when you add anything that is acid to the hair, it will close the cuticles, and if you add something alkaline, the cuticles will open in the hair. Therefore a conditioner is always acid [PH somewhere between 2,5 and 5,5], because it then supposedly closes the cuticles and removes the porosity of the hair. This is, however, true only, if the hair is healthy. But if the hair is "sick" , then it is not possible for the conditioner to close the cuticles permanently and the hair is porous again in a couple of hours after applying the conditioner.
2] The cation activity of the conditioner: the cation activity means that the ingredients of the conditioners are positive and the hair is statically negative. Everyone of us has sometimes played with a magnet; when it is taken close to iron, they will draw and stick together. This happens, because statically the negative and positive are drawn together. Exactly the same thing happens, when a conditioner is added to the hair. The positive ingredients of the conditioner are drawn towards the negative hair. If your hair is relatively healthy, this will mean that the conditioner will form a coating or build-up on your hair causing additional problems.
What are these ingredients? Basically you will find these elements in three different categories: a] animal protein a nicer way to name the fat, b] stearin or wax of which the candles are made of c] different polymers, usually plastics. By reading the label you will find which of these are present in your favorite conditioner.
The conditioners work on the hair in the following ways: the first thing they do, they close the cuticles, because of the acidity, secondly they coat the hair by adding the ingredients mentioned above to the hair through the cation activity. So it is virtually impossible for any of the elements to penetrate into the hair and even if they did it wouldn't do any good. This results in a build-up on the hair, which is never good for the hair because the hair will gradually dry inside this coating. Even a slight build-up or a coating, as it is also called, makes the hair very unmanageable and not obedient, so it is more difficult to style and the set won't hold and it is much more difficult to get it to look beautiful and polished. Then in a fine or baby-fine hair, which many times is also flat, this "coating" weighs the hair down even more, so the hair looks like it does not have any volume, fluff or body at all.
Once the hair is "sick" and it is continuously porous, when the acid conditioner is added to the hair after each hair wash, it closes the cuticle temporarily, but after a hour or two the cuticles open again and the hair is porous again. Finally, the cuticle will break like a wire that you are bending continuously. If you are adding the heat of an appliance to the hair [ e.g. a curling iron, blow dryer, flat iron], the coating on the hair will intensify the heat so that the hair will start breaking.
We have now established the fact that a conditioner never makes the hair really healthy or even healthy looking, so why are so many people using them still. The reason is that there has not been anything that would make the hair really healthy from inside out. One thing the conditioners do: they detangle hair after a hair wash and this is what they usually call "manageability" to be able to comb your hair through after a hair wash. No, manageability really means that your hair obeys your every command to the detail. A healthy hair never tangles! But because it is the acidity that detangles the hair you do not really need a conditioner for this. All you need is a cup of water with teaspoonful of lemon juice in it and rinse with it, the hair doesn't tangle at all and is very shiny.
A well-established TV news program had a university conduct a study on conditioners and conditioning shampoos: the result was, that all of them are based on the same ingredients with variance only in fragrance and color and so called add-ons, and on same half a century old principles. The study also clearly showed that by adding vitamins and minerals to the conditioners does not have any effect to the hair at all. The only way for them to affect is to get them internally by eating healthy foods or taking supplements.
A very little talked about, but extremely serious, side effect the conditioners have: they also coat and form a build-up on the scalp. Thus they prevent the scalp from breathing causing the hair to become weak and then break even more easily. Even worse this coating on the scalp prevents partially new hair from growing, because it cannot penetrate through a layer of conditioning. So less and less hair comes out the scalp. Very often this coating on the scalp causes itching and irritation, which luckily gradually disappears, when the coating is removed. Many times people are diagnosed of having dandruff and then treated with dandruff medication and shampoos, but they don't work, because this flaking is not dandruff,but build-up from conditioners and conditioning shampoos.
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