What's in Conditioner? | Ingredients With George Zaidan (Episode 8)

What's in here? What's it do? And can I make it from scratch?

Ingredients: The point of hair conditioner is pretty much exactly what the TV says it is: to give you sleek, shiny, manageable hair and to protect it from all kinds of damage, both accidental and on purpose. And I can't believe I'm about to say this, but when it comes to conditioner, there's truth in advertising. Almost. But we will come back to that later.

Now, to understand how conditioner works, we need to first understand how hair works. Specifically, the outermost layer of hair, which is called the epicuticle. Now the epicuticle is thin—one ten-thousandth the thickness of a full strand of hair—thin, but it's the most important part because that's where the conditioner interacts.

Now the inside of the epicuticle is formed by a group of proteins called keratins, and because of the way they fold, keratins are negatively charged on the outside. Remember that; it's going to be important later. The keratins also serve as anchors for the outer part of the epicuticle: fatty acids—molecules with long carbon chains—just like fats.

But back to conditioners. Let's look at the ingredients of these two popular conditioners. Now we can split these up into two groups: one, the stuff that actually conditions your hair, and two, everything else. Now I'm going to focus on the stuff that actually conditions your hair. We can split this group up into three chemical families.

First, quaternary ammonium salts, or quats for short. A quat is a nitrogen atom with one or more long chains of carbon attached to it, like you'd find in a fat. The critical thing about quats is that nitrogen is positively charged, so it's attracted to the negatively charged hair surface and can bind to it, leaving that long fatty acid tail sticking up.

The second category is fatty alcohols, most commonly cetyl or stearyl alcohol. Now these are not like the alcohol you may be used to—the stuff in here is ethanol. It's got two carbons. Fatty alcohols have more—way more—carbons, like 16 or 17 or even more than that. And then there's glyceryl dioleate, which is technically not an alcohol, but the structure is sort of similar, so we're going to lump it into this category.

Now, if all of these look like quats, that's because they all have long fatty carbon chains. The third and final category are the silicone compounds: dimethicone, amodimethicone, and cyclopentasiloxane. The whole point of any conditioner is to lubricate, which makes combing a lot easier and reduces the forces on the very tips of your hair.

This is why conditioners help prevent split ends. Lubrication also means less of that, less static charge buildup, which means fewer flyaways. Now the silicones in particular form a thin oily film on the surface of your hair. And yes, that helps lubricate, but it also reflects light, which makes your hair shiny.

There are some other chemicals that are used to condition hair, like some polymers, but these are the most common, and they're all oily or fatty. Now if you're thinking, "Why would I add oils or fats to my hair? That's gross!" Remember that conditioners are actually replenishing the natural fattiness or oiliness that's already in your hair and on your hair.

So why would a single conditioner have more than one type of conditioning agent? Well, because combinations usually work better than a single type alone, and certain mixtures of quats and fatty alcohols can form these extended gel networks that make the conditioners thicker.

And that brings me full circle back to truth in advertising. Look, conditioner does what it says it's going to do; it gives you sleek, shiny, manageable hair. But like with other consumer products, people sometimes buy conditioner based on stuff that has nothing to do with how well it actually works.

For example, thickness—manufacturers add thickeners to conditioner to make them extra creamy, even though how thick they are doesn't really have much to do with how well they coat your hair. Or take glyceryl dioleate. Now, this molecule does do some conditioning, but manufacturers mostly add it for opacity and pearlescence, which apparently we like.

And then there's the label. Manufacturers will highlight certain ingredients right on the front of the label—stuff like, and I kid you not, ultra-whipped egg white proteins, cherry blossom, ginseng, ginger, or more basic stuff like coconut milk, vitamin E, or even apricot.

Now lots of people swear by this kind of stuff, but I've also heard these conditioners referred to as "kitchen sink conditioners" because you literally add anything you can think of and hope that one of your random ingredients makes someone buy the product.

In the end, it comes down to what works for your hair. Everybody's is a little bit different, especially if you've chemically changed it in some way. So I'd say just go out and try a few different brands and see what works best. I buy mine based on smell alone, so there's that.

So the main ingredients in conditioners are quats, fatty alcohols, and silicones. I'm going to try and make conditioner from scratch using only natural ingredients, starting with cetyl alcohol. Now if I had a bunch of time, I would make it from palm oil, but I don't, so I just bought some. And instead of silicone, I'm using olive oil and coconut oil. For fragrance, I've got peppermint and rosemary essential oils because they smell delightful.

Now all these ingredients are fatty or oily, and since I don't want to be rubbing pure fatty oily stuff into my hair, I'm going to make an oil-in-water emulsion, which is basically a salad dressing. It's what most manufacturers do, and it's the reason that water is usually the number one ingredient on conditioner labels.

Now, to keep everything together, my emulsifier is going to be soy lecithin. So let's do this and see what happens.

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Okay, so after a couple of minutes of blending, it looks like we kind of have like a jiggly mayonnaise, which is actually a good sign because mayonnaise is an emulsion. So I'm going to let this cool and then I'm going to put it in my hair.

All right, guys, I've got my conditioner. I'm going to try it out. Looks pretty! So as you can see, it's pouring out pretty easy. And, uh, overnight this turned from that sort of hard thick mayonnaise consistency to a more liquidy conditioner consistency, which is cool, and I did not expect that.

It doesn't really feel very conditioner-y, so I'm just going to... there we go. Oh yeah, there it is. Okay, that's much better. Okay, yes, now it feels like conditioner. So now it feels like not quite as rich or, um, fatty for lack of a better word as a real conditioner, but not half bad. It definitely is coating my hair, and as you can see, it's sort of coating my hands too, as a normal conditioner would, although an alarming number of my hairs are coming out.

Now, let's see how it rinses off. Hey, this feels remarkably like conditioner! I would give this a 7 and 1/2 out of 10. I'd like it to be a little bit less fluid so it doesn't drip everywhere, and I was kind of disappointed that I had to use so much of it to get the conditioner effect. But overall, not half bad.

All right, if you guys have any ideas on how to improve this recipe, let me know in the comments or please hit me up on Twitter. And for now, I'm going to need some privacy.

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Please! Hot! Ow!