sade087

I'm one of those people with silky-feeling hair that accumulates products like a lollipop dropped in the lint trap of a rarely-cleaned dryer. Some people and some products don't get along. For this post, the focus is on Polyquaternium products. This curl asks, "Are poly- quats for me? Polyquaterniums (and a few other things in this post) are "active ingredients" or functional ingredients in hair care. They're not there to make the product look pretty or smell nice or feel nice, they're used because they actively condition or detangle or because they form a film that creates "hold" in a product. Some of these ingredients help your hair hold on to hair dye longer or provide UV protection. ©Science-y Hair Blog 2013 All of the ingredients that will be listed below with moderate to high build-up potential resist washing off with water and with shampoo (or anything else you use to clean your hair - conditioner, acids, baking soda…) unless noted. They...

If you're the kind of person whose hair reacts badly to hair styling products sometimes, often something like polyquaternium is to blame. These ingredients provide hold, may reduce frizz and can condition the hair. But they also bond to the hair and do not rinse or wash off easily. They don't build up for everybody - so I want to show you what it might look like if they build up on your hair. This is wavy hair on day one with a hair gel containing Polyquaternium-4. Day one with polyquaternium-containing gel. The same product was used again for the photo below, probably just rinsing the hair in between. But the second use revealed the ugly side of polyquaterniums. Everything was done the same as the day before. But the result was quite different. Stringy, crunchy, less volume, dull, less wave definition, kind of sparse and a little frizzy. Second use of polyquaternium-containing gel. So now you know. If this happens to you and your hair gel (or shampoo or conditioner or mousse o...