HAIR PRODUCTS LEAVE A TRACE, CHOOSE WISELY.
Most people think that when they rinse hair products off in the shower, those products wash down the drain. But what most people don’t realize is that hair products – even the “rinse-off” ones! – also leave a residue behind that is invisible to the eye but still very much there.
Leave-in hair styling products, as well as many rinse-off products, by design bind to the hair and leave a residue to give you those gorgeous locks. If 100% of the products rinsed off in the shower, you wouldn’t get the hair benefits you were looking for and would question why you spent all that money for nothing. Here’s the rub: that residue also makes its way onto your skin.
WHAT IS ON YOUR HAIR IS ON YOUR SKIN!
Hair products make their way onto the skin as shampoo and conditioner rinse down the face and body in the shower, depositing their invisible film as they flow. Residue from hair products also makes its way onto your skin from direct transfer (think long hair resting on your shoulders and back all day), or from a towel or pillowcase.
The point is, once you put hair products on your hair, the residue finds a way – via water, sweat, towel, pillowcase, or just contact against skin – to migrate to your face and body, including the back. As we like to say, what goes on hair, goes on skin.
We’ve actually done a ground-breaking scientific study proving that hair care products deposit on the skin – specifically the scalp, forehead, cheek, and upper back. And the results are amazing. In the chart below, each row is a body part, and each column is a duration of time. Before hair products are used, there’s no residue (dark blue), which makes sense. Even 2 hours after using rinse off hair care products there is residue on the scalp, forehead, upper back, and cheek! And 4 hours after using a leave-in styling product there is residue on the same areas! In fact, with the leave-in styling product, the amount of residue generally INCREASES over time. So if you use a styling cream, as the day goes on more of it is transferring from your hair to your face and body.
WHY DO I CARE?
We all want our skin looking and feeling as good as possible. Our face and body are what we present to the world and we want to be seen for our best selves (which is the reason, by the way, that our brand is called SEEN). Discovering that hair products leave a residue on our skin is a big deal because it encourages questions about what is in the products we put on our hair. In other words, it raises questions about the quality of the residue being left behind. If the residue is yucky and clogs pores, that can cause breakouts. And by the way, not all residue is bad. When we put expensive moisturizers on our face, that is residue on the skin.
Ideally, we want to use hair products that respect the skin by providing a skin-friendly residue, without pore-clogging ingredients and irritants. We need our pores to breathe to promote healthy and beautiful skin. This is exactly what we set out to do with SEEN, luxury skin-caring hair care that is clinically proven to be non-comedogenic and non-irritating so you don’t have to choose between beautiful hair and beautiful skin.
Thanks to the scientific analysis we’ve done, we now know that hair products have a lingering effect on our skin, in some cases long after they’re put on our head. We believe that it’s time to have a conversation about that residue and to hold hair products to a higher standard.
