Women’s hair loss and thinning are at an all-time high and attributed to everything from diet to stress to hormones. But could the cause be traced to something as simple as unnecessary ingredients in shampoos? Gail Federici, industry veteran, says yes.
“Shampoos were originally developed simply to cleanse the hair and scalp and only contained ingredients to remove dirt and oil. Over the years formulas started to become packed with ingredients that had nothing to do with cleansing” explains Federici, CEO of Federici Brands, LLC, creators of Color Wow and other solutions to women’s real hair problems.
“With the advent of NoPoos, conditioning shampoos, cleansing conditioners and 2-in-1 shampoo/conditioner duos, formulators began to add ingredients to promote conditioning, smoothing, and shine to the detergents. These ingredients do not easily rinse off. They adhere to the hair and can stick to the scalp.
Adding those ingredients into shampoos is counter-productive as they not only leave a film on the hair dulling it and weighing it down but, much worse than that, they can impede new hair growth.”
Unlike other hair products, shampoos are massaged into the scalp, so heavy silicones, conditioning ingredients and pearlizing agents that are engineered to “stay behind” can impact the health of the scalp. While beneficial when applied mid-shaft to ends for conditioning and styling, those ingredients can build up and prevent healthy new hair growth when present in a shampoo, eventually leading to thinning and hair loss.
“It actually does not make sense to put ingredients into a shampoo that not only have nothing to do with the cleansing process, but actually, do the opposite, says Federici. When you really think about it, it becomes a blinding glimpse of the obvious.”
“We arrived at this “aha” moment while we were developing the Color Wow range. We couldn’t figure out why hair color never looked as fresh as the day it was done. We made a sulfate-free shampoo that was as gentle as water so we knew the color wasn’t leaching out but it still looked dull after a few weeks. After much analysis, the penny dropped. The shampoo wasn’t really cleaning the hair. No shampoo was because they all contained these silicones, etc. that are not easily washed off.
That’s when we decided to do the unthinkable, pull out all these conditioning agents and silicones which was antithetical to the industry norm, and keep the only the cleansing ingredients… enter Color Wow Color Security Shampoo!