What Is In Your Shampoo?

I started delaying cleansing my hair everyday and try to go 3 days before "washing" my hair out of concern for how damaged my hair was.  In order to preserve my new intense red color, I have decided to try to forgo shampoo as much as possible and only wet my hair, massage my scalp and condition my hair.  I am hoping to only shampoo once every 10 days or so if I can stand it.  I am using dry shampoo on the days I don't condition to absorb excess sebum and avoid the greasy look.  I also decided to look at the ingredients in the dozen or so bottles of shampoo I have floating around on my counters and cabinets.

What an eye opener!  It is kind of frustrating to realize your premium, professional salon only shampoo contains Sodium Laureth Sulfate, Sodium Methylparaben and Methylparaben.  I expect these ingredients in grocery store brands, but not in products put out by one of the big names in haircare products.  The only shampoo I could come up with in my arsenal that is sulfate-free is Loreal EverPure Smooth Shampoo from Kroger.  I have a ton of Redken and Biosilk shampoo products and all of them have sulfates!  It is kind of hard to pimp these salon products when my Clairol Herbal Essesnces has many of the same ingredients.  It makes it really hard to justify the price difference with a straight face.

There are studies that say parabens are bad and other that say they are o.k.  Sodium Laureth Sulfate is an irritant and causes damage to the hair follicle.  It dissolves oil and denatures skin proteins which can cause skin to break down and allow in environmental contaminants.  Sodium Laureth Sulfate is cheap and that is why companies continue to use it.  I don't know that I want to cleanse my hair with a product that is also used as an engine degreaser.  I am going to do some more research and experiment with going shampoo free and see how it works out.  I need to look up the rest of the ingredients on each of the bottles so I know exactly what they do.  I kind of expect the shampoo lobby to come at me with their version of the high fructose corn syrup commercials.

My sister-in-law needed a deep conditioning treatment today at school and someone suggested Cholesterol.  I looked at the ingredients and Sodium Laureth Sulfate was one of them.  I can't figure out what a conditioner/moisture treatment would need with a degreaser.  It seemed counter intuitive.  I shampooed her with a Redken product not realizing it has SLES in it and then slathered Redken All Soft Heavy Cream on her hair.  We put a plastic cap over it and let her sit for 30 minutes.  I rinsed it out and sprayed Redken Shot pHix on it.  Her hair was super soft.  Now I feel like a dufus for ranting about SLES in the Cholesterol, but used a product containing it to shampoo her hair.