Ingredients in Hair Care Products can clean your hair and leave it looking like you just stepped out of a salon. But have you given any thought to what ingredients you have just subjected your health to? Do you know if your body has just received a does of some potentially dangerous chemical? Chances are, you have not given it any thought at all – But you should…
What Do You Put on Your Hair?
We are all aware that we should not use artificial or potentially toxic ingredients in our food. Indeed many of us have made the conscious decision to go one step further by choosing natural skin care products instead products containing synthetic and possibly harmful chemicals.
But when it comes to personal care products such as shampoos, conditioners and liquid/solid soaps, etc., we tend to disregard the concept of remaining with natural products. There’s a simple explanation for this.
We, the consumers, are basically under the impression that washing our hair and body is not likely to poison us. After all, the soap stays on the hair/skin for only a short period of time and gets washed off when we’re finished. How could the chemicals in a shampoo or a conditioner possibly affect us adversely?
Fair question. However, if you think that they don’t, you would be quite wrong.
The skin can absorb chemicals very Glykol grossist quickly and easily if the molecules are not too large for it to do so. In addition, the skin is never in perfect condition. That is, there are tiny little tears, cuts and abrasions on our skin almost all the time.
Scratching the skin to relieve an itch, for example, can easily damage the skin. You can’t necessarily see it with the naked eye, but it is nevertheless damaged. Insect bits, clothes rubbing repeatedly against the skin, etc., can all cause microscopic damage to the skin and jeopardise its integrity.
Where the skin is damaged the larger molecules, which would normally not be absorbed, can enter the deeper layers of the skin and may enter the bloodstream access to anywhere in the body.
The problem is that when you use a product that does contain questionable ingredients, which have the potential to cause harm, you inadvertently allow these ingredients to be absorbed by the body, without intention or knowing about it.
Shampoos are a classic example of potentially toxic cocktails we seem to be oblivious to. Below is an example of ingredients used by a well-known manufacturer of personal care products who distributes their products worldwide. It is a typical example of the type of ingredients you would find by looking at the ingredients of shampoos on sale in your local shopping centre or at your hairdresser.
The ingredients below are from a 2 in 1 Shampoo & Conditioner. Where possible I provided some comment after the ingredient that provides some insight into the safety of the particular ingredient for human use.
It must be said, however, that the toxicity of some of the ingredients is related to the consumption of the ingredient and while a shampoo is not consumed as such, chemicals can nevertheless be absorbed through the skin and enter the blood stream, essentially being the same as if you had eaten them.