A New Dry Shampoo... and Maybe a Crisis of Conscience!
I consider myself a dry shampoo connoisseur. I've written a few posts here about it, and I'm consistently evangelizing about dry shampoo to the unsuspecting masses. A few weeks ago my lady friend Hilary and I were at Anthropologie and she was buying a sea salt spray for her hair (Hil is the kind of gal that can spray salt water in her damp hair, scrunch it up, and achieve the kind of effortless waves the rest of us can only dream of), and we ended up chatting about hair products with a saleswoman. I mentioned my love of dry shampoo, and said, "Oh, I'm nothing without dry shampoo." I'd just moments before raved hyperbolically about something else, and the saleswoman was like, "Whoa. You're, uh, passionate about the things you like." I know. I made a whole blog about it. If you ask me for a dry shampoo recommendation, my immediate pick would be Not Your Mother's. It's inexpensive, effective, and now it comes in an unscented version, which to me is ideal. But Not Your Mother's is very tame in terms of volume. I'd say it's for the person who needs just a little help, or who shampoos every other day and needs a boost on that in-between day. I used to be the latter person, but recently I have become a bridge troll who prefers to wash her hair only when the mood strikes her, which is usually every three to four days. Unfortunately, I am also a grease monster and my hair is not down with this plan. I know every magazine article about washing your hair less says, "Your hair will be greasy at first but it will adjust!" LIES. My hair aspires to Anastasia Krupnik grease levels when left unchecked, and no "adjustment period" will change that.
For awhile I was using Living Proof's Perfect Hair Day Dry Shampoo, and while I loved the mega-volume their dry shampoo added, I wasn't too crazy about the price tag, and I'm pretty sure it was making my scalp break out (a huge deal breaker). However, I did get addicted to the volume I got from Living Proof vs the ho-hum effect I was achieving with Not Your Mother's. I needed a fix and NYM wasn't doing the trick anymore. I ended up back in the aisles of Target, wondering which dry shampoo would be the next Chosen One.
I ended up picking up Dove Refresh + Care Volume and Fullness Dry Shampoo. I had avoided all Dove products for awhile because I knew many of them contained BHT, a preservative I'm sensitive to. I'm not particularly preachy about chemicals, and I'm generally an advocate for educating yourself and making your own decisions (GMOs aren't bad! Educate yourselves!), but BHT is straight up nasty. And the crazy thing is, BHT is banned in Europe and Japan, where companies like Dove sell the same products they sell in the US. Which means Dove makes the same shampoo, but makes two versions, one containing BHT that they sell in the US, and one without that they sell everywhere else. That gets me kind of miffed (at the FDA, at Dove, at America... just generally), so I went from being a huge Dove customer to being a Dove boycotter. Until a few weeks ago, when I looked at the label on Dove's dry shampoo.
There was no BHT to be found. Was there BHT before? When I discovered my sensitivity I didn't write down what products contained BHT and what didn't - I just remember that I needed to change my deodorant and shampoo and was frustrated that Dove used BHT so often in products that were a part of my everyday life. And now, writing this blog about Dove Dry Shampoo, I found out that I've written about Dove's Dry Shampoo before! So maybe I was avoiding a product that didn't contain my most hated chemical simply because of brand discrimination? I knew about my sensitivity when I wrote about Dove Dry Shampoo before, so I assume this new version of their dry shampoo isn't a reformulated, BHT-free formula. I'm confused, and for right now, I'm going to focus on making sure that I steer clear of chemicals that I know make me feel sick while also fulfilling my dreams of having hair as big as my dreams (of big hair). I might not stick with Dove's Dry Shampoo, and I'm still not on lovey-dovey terms with Dove as a brand, but I'm also not in the mood to take on a personal crusade against deodorant. Plus, my hair is so big and beautiful! And I haven't washed it in three days!
