It’s really fun and interesting to make your own hair care products. You can decide what you really want in, say, a shampoo, and create one made exactly for your own needs. You can choose ingredients that will help oily or dry hair, give more volume to fine hair, brighten or lightly tint your hair, even control dandruff and address that slight thinning you’ve been noticing!  You can create other hair products, too. Conditioners, rinses, gels, styling cremes, bleaches, and conditioning dressings are all easily made at home, and you can tailor each one to your personal preferences. Even the scent!

Once you decided what exact qualities you need in your hair products (control for oily hair that needs body and just a hint of color to make your dark tresses shine, for example), you have a couple more decisions to make. When you go online to research hair products you can make yourself, you’ll find that some of them contain ingredients (for example, rubbing alcohol, borax, ammonia, and or different gums) that are or could be considered chemical or unnatural, and have to be purchased at the pharmacy. There are natural ingredients that can be used to substitute for these, but the effects they have may be different.

Another decision is whether you want to use any animal derived ingredients in your homemade hair products. Lanolin, beeswax, glycerin, keratin; these all come from animal sources and are standard in many hair care products. You can instead use various vegetable derived ingredients for these with similar results. Looking online for lists of vegan products will lead you to substitutes for these ingredients.

One of the really great things about making your own hair products at home is that you can make small batches and keep experimenting until you find the perfect combination of ingredients that work for you and your hair.

Photo: Vola Vale