Oils Dominican Hair Alliance

Can I Use Oils on Protein Sensitive Hair? It’s Simple . . .

by DHA's DIY | Apr 4, 2022 | Protein Sensitivity, Oils, Uncategorized

Can oils contain protein? Are there oils that protein-sensitive hair should not touch?

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Having trouble separating the hair hysteria from real haircare advice? read below. . .

Oils on Protein Sensitive Hair:

What really has protein in it?

After finding out you have protein-sensitive hair, one of the first things you get sick of is the restrictive diet of products you now have to adhere to, all for the good of your hair. But in addition to the proteins, there is something else you really ought to steer clear of: the widespread misconception as to what products actually contain protein.

First off: oils are 100% fat. They contain no protein. Here’s an example of what a protein molecule looks like. Next to it is a fat molecule:

The basic structure of fats is three fatty acids (a combination of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen) attached to a glycerol backbone. Proteins, in contrast, are made from a combination of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen atoms (in the case of hair protein, there’s some sulphur in there, too). Plus, complex proteins like keratin have four different structural levels, from the basic sequence of amino acids, to the folding of the molecule itself.

In short, very different things. Bar contamination (unlikely to be at a high enough concentration to affect even the most Princess-and-the-Pea type hair) your bottle of oil is not going to contain protein, even if that oil comes from a protein-rich fruit. Like one of these:

Can I Use Shea Butter Oil on Protein Sensitive Hair

Can I Use Coconut Oil on Protein Sensitive Hair

Can I Use almond Oil on Protein Sensitive Hair

So feel free to experiment with oils like macadamia, almond and coconut oil; although they are derived from fruits with protein in them, they themselves are protein-free. (Coconut is not even that concentrated a source of protein, by the way). If you do find that your hair is not compatible with these oils, it’s not because of protein. The real answer is probably something a lot more nebulous and a lot less satisfactory: Every head of hair is different and will thus react differently to different products for different reasons.

And there’s another reason not to eschew certain oils because of anti-protein hysteria: Even if your hair can’t stand proteins, you probably still need the reinforcement proteins give. You just have to get it from somewhere else. Certain oils can provide some strength-enhancing benefits, and, in some cases, largely replace the use of proteins.

Coconut oil and olive oil in particular have been proven to strengthen the hair from the inside out, whereas protein treatments, because of the size of the molecules, work only on the outside of the hair shaft – they’re just too big to get inside. (Amino acids, the basic components of proteins are a little different, due to their small size.)

Dominican Hair Alliance Protein Sensitive Hair

If you can’t use additional proteins, and your hair needs strength, then you really need to be holding on to the natural proteins you already have – the keratin your hair is made from. Olive and coconut oil help with that by actually preventing protein loss. And don’t forget – hair is not only made of protein. Lipids – oils and fats – are naturally present in the hair, and have their role to play in keeping the hair strong, too.

So protein-sensitive heads can benefit greatly from leaving in these lipids overnight (the oils take long to penetrate) on a regular basis, to get the protection they offer from the cuticle down to the cortex.

And don’t sleep on oils that don’t permeate the hair shaft, either. Part of the role of the naturally-occurring lipids on the surface of your strands is to confer strength, a job with which these non-penetrating oils can assist.

The moral of the story. . .

Just because your hair spurns protein-rich products, does not mean you have to shun the oils derived from them, too. These separate substances are protein-free and can have a lot to offer your hair, particularly if you can’t benefit from the heavy-duty protection proteins provide.

Image Credits

|Jeff Carson |Wikimedia Commons| G W Fabian |Healthalicious |Tobias Myrstrand Leander|

oils on protein sensitive hair oils on protein sensitive hair oils on protein sensitive hair oils on protein sensitive hair oils on protein sensitive hair oils on protein sensitive hair oils on protein sensitive hair oils on protein sensitive hair oils on protein sensitive hair

Hair Growth Oils: A Scam Or Do They Really Work?

by DHA's DIY | Mar 31, 2022 | Hair Growth, INCI: all about the ingredients, Oils

It seems like every day a new hair growth oil comes out promising longer, thicker hair overnight.

But is it all too good to be true?

If you’ve invested more than you’d care to disclose in these magic hair growth oils, what we found out may surprise you.

We decided to hit the books and go deep into the databases for this one. Long story short: Some oils are a gimmick and have negligible to zero impact on your hair growth. But there are some oils that can actually help your hair grow.

The composition of every hair growth oil is different and whether it has a chance of working or not depends on its ingredients. If you haven’t seen any growth from using these oils, there are a couple of other things you need to check, too.

What ingredients grow your hair?

Girl with hair in large puff stands in front of plants. www.dominicanhairalliance.com

Several ingredients have been scientifically proven to grow hair. Image by Asa Dugger.

For all the duds and hype on the market, there are some ingredients that can actually grow hair. These are both natural and manmade substances which have been scientifically proven to stimulate hair follicles. Each of them work in different ways, so whether they are effective or not will depend on what’s causing your growth issue, and what your hair growth goals are.

Some hair growth ingredients reactivate inactive follicles so your hair grows back looking fuller. Others thicken individual strands, some speed up the growth rate, and some extend the anagen or growth phase of your hair cycle, giving your hair more time to grow before the natural resting and shedding processes take place.

So yes, in a nutshell there are ingredients that can grow your hair. In fact, there are so many with the science to back them up, that we can’t list them all. So here are just a dozen for starters:

Rosemary
Peppermint
Lavender
Onion
Garlic
Pumpkin seed
Green tea
Marine proteins
Iron
Selenium
Vitamin E
Zinc

How to check the ingredients list on hair growth oils

Image of glass bottle containing 'Magical Natural Hair Growth Oil' www.dominicanhairalliance.com

Product ingredients are listed in order of concentration. Image by Anis M and Dominican Hair Alliance.

Now that you’re familiar with some of the ingredients that grow hair, it’s time to become an ingredients detective.

So flip it around to the back of the bottle, where you’ll see the ingredients listed in INCI format. See if you spot any of the ingredients from the list above (hint: there are four of them on this bottle).

If you’ve looked at the lists and are still not sure, you can ask us any ingredients questions in the comments section below.
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Check the concentration of the hair growth ingredients

If you see any proven hair growth ingredients in there, that’s a good sign.

Now move onto phase 2: Concentration. This is hard to know for sure because brands don’t have to list the exact percentage of an ingredient on their labels.

But we can estimate how much they contain for most ingredients, at least within a range. That’s because in several countries, brands have to list ingredients in a specific order, using the correct INCI name. If they are following the system correctly, the ingredients will be listed in order of concentration.

Ingredients should be listed in descending order, so the ones the product contains the most of are towards the top of the list.

But ingredients don’t have to be at the top of the list to work.

The necessary concentration for an ingredient to be effective depends on the type of ingredient. For instance, if the ingredient is a carrier oil, it would need to be towards the top of the list to have an impact on your hair growth because carriers oils are less potent.

Image of containers of dried marigolds, then fresh marigolds, then macerated calendula oil. www.dominicanhairalliance.com

Macerated oils are less concentrated extracts, created by soaking herbs in oils. Image by Silviarita.

Essential oils or other highly concentrated extracts can be at or close to the bottom, since they only have to be present in small concentrations to work – as low as 3% has been shown to increase growth for at least one essential oil.

The problem is knowing which form of the extract you’re dealing with, as INCI doesn’t require manufacturers to specify whether they’re using an macerated extract (infused from the herb into the oil, which would need to be higher in the list to be effective) or an essential oil, or other concentrate (both of which can be low on the list).

Use these ingredients to check how concentrated it is

Luckily, you can use other ingredients on the list to tell if the product doesn’t have a high enough concentration of the hair growth ingredient in question – even for an essential oil.

For instance, if the hair growth ingredient comes after certain ingredients which have to be used at extremely low concentrations, then you can be pretty certain that the product does not contain a good amount of that star ingredient.

Preservatives are a good example; they’re usually at, or very close to, the end of the ingredients list. That’s because the amount used in products is typically very low, like 1% or under. Preservatives include ingredients like iodopropynyl butyl carbamate, phenoxyethanol, or any paraben. Antioxidants like sodium benzoate (which can be a preservative too), tend to go into the formula at low concentrations also, so they’re another good marker to use.

If you see a hair growth ingredient included after any one of these ingredients, chances are it’s not being included as an actual active ingredient, but just for claim purposes. Methylparaben for example, goes into the formula at a maximum of 0.4%. This is a percentage that very few active ingredients would be expected to work well at, so most hair growth ingredients that come after it will probably have little to no effect.

Woman with big curly hair and glasses stands in front of bush with purple flowers. www.dominicanhairalliance.com

Floral ingredients can be an infused extract or an essential oil. Image by Jhefferson Santos.

Watch out for ingredients that block hair growth

Next, you need to check the label for any ingredients that interfere with the hair growth ingredients’ work. Most commonly, this happens when the formula includes ingredients that are capable of forming a layer on your skin’s surface which stops or limits the product’s ability to penetrate into your scalp properly.

Certain silicones and petrolatum may do this. So could many natural oils and butters that provide a barrier function. On the other hand, oils which absorb easily into the skin, such as coconut or olive, could be good for improving delivery of the actives into your hair follicles.

Poor quality ingredients limit effectiveness of hair growth oils

Another common reason why many hair growth products fail is the quality of the ingredients. So while, say, rosemary oil has been proven to have hair growth properties, that doesn’t mean that a hair growth oil that contains it will definitely grow your hair.

Why? Many natural ingredients are extremely delicate and can lose their properties if not gently processed. Sometimes, ingredients are stored incorrectly or for too long, and lose their potency. And natural ingredients have very wide variance anyway: not every castor plant will yield the same quality castor seeds to make good castor oil, for example, and the quality of the crop might vary from season to season – even on the same plants.

Unfortunately, the use of low quality ingredients is not always obvious, although a suspiciously low price can be a hint (in some cases), especially when the label lists ingredients which are generally expensive.

So why isn’t this hair growth oil growing my hair?

But what if you’re pretty sure you have a product with a solid formulation, made of the finest quality ingredients, known to increase hair growth? All the ingredients are in the right place on the ingredients list, plus you’ve seen tons of people having success with the same product.

If your product has passed all these tests, then why isn’t it working for you?

Images of purple plant extracts in clear glass bottles. www.dominicanhairalliance.com

Hair growth products might not work for different reasons, including potency or usage. Image by Silviarita.

You’ve not been using the hair growth oil long enough

You might need to give it time. Especially if you’re trying to wake up inactive follicles and grow hair from scratch; these products take time to work. Remember, hair grows at 0.5 inches a month on average – and many people’s hair grows a lot slower than that. So even if you are using a product designed to speed it up, the results are not going to come in a day.

From the experiments we looked at, most products tended to show results over a 2 to 6 month period – yes that long. One ingredient did show visible results within just 2 weeks. But that was soft, vellus hair from patients that had suffered hair loss; it still took them 2 months to grow thick, normal strands.

No hair growth product will work for everyone

In all of the studies we’ve looked at, there was one thing that held true in every single one. Some methods worked for more people than others, but no hair growth method was universally effective. Unfortunately, just because it worked for almost everyone doesn’t mean it will work for you.

The most important part of hair growth most people miss

And here’s the other big factor in hair growth. The ends. We always think about the roots when we talk about growing hair longer, but good hair growth practices start at the ends, not the roots. It may sound contradictory, but here’s what we mean by that: Usually, unless you have some kind of scalp disorder or injury, hair is almost always growing.

The reason most of us don’t see the full length our hair offers is because we don’t take enough care of the hair at the ends. You can be getting a 40% increase on growth at the scalp, but because you do certain practices that compromise your ends on the daily, your hair breaks off and you never, ever see that growth.

It then becomes a vicious cycle of rubbing stuff onto your scalp waiting for growth that never seems to come – because you keep breaking the evidence off at the ends.

Image of woman with curly long hair standing in a field. www.dominicanhairalliance.com

When hair is kept intact at the ends it can grow much longer, regardless of texture. Image by Jose Danilo.

So unless you’re dealing with a scalp emergency like thinning, excess shedding or balding, before you start to focus on the latest hair growth solution, you need to master your ends care solution.

Once you figure out how to keep the ends of your hair mostly intact, you just need to kick back and let your scalp continue to do its part. After all, it is covered with hundreds of thousands of mini hair-growing machines called follicles. Get your ends care game on lock, and the natural hair factory on top of your head will keep supplying you with growth. That’s a new half inch or so every month which you can now accumulate for longer and longer hair.

When you start seeing returns from that, you can start experimenting with hair growth oils to accelerate hair growth – maybe add some thickness, too. That is the perfect time to really harness the hair-growing properties of these oils to help you hit your hair goal faster.

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For more on the hair growth ingredients that really grow your hair, you can sign up to get Growth Drops. Every week, we check the science and tell you what ingredients work and what don’t.

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Drying Oils: The Ingredients That Secretly Dry Out Your Hair

by DHA's DIY | Mar 31, 2022 | Dry Hair, INCI: all about the ingredients, Oils

Drying oils are used by paint manufacturers to make paint dry faster.

They’re key ingredients in linoleum, putty and varnishes too.

So what are they doing in your hair products?

Drying oils: The low-key ingredients that dry out your hair

By now most naturals know: oils can’t moisturise your hair on their own, but did you know there was such a thing as a ‘drying oil’?

Drying oils are added to paint to help it dry faster. And guess what? They’re in several haircare products, too. If your hair normally ‘likes’ oils but you’ve noticed your strands feeling stiffer or brittle after using a particular oil-containing product, it could be because that oil is a drying oil.

What is a drying oil?

So what oils are drying oils? Un-natural petrochemicals like mineral oil? Synthetic ‘moisture blocking’ silicones? None of the above.

Most drying oils are 100% natural, so plant-based and pure you could eat them. They’re nutritious, often brimming with Omega-3s and a ton of health benefits. But they can leave your hair feeling like straw.

Some of the most common drying oils you might recognise from the back of your leave in or oil blend: flaxseed oil, hemp oil and soybean oil. Yes, those.

Flaxseed oil is a popular drying oil and can leave hair feeling brittle. Image by alexdante.

This definitely runs counter to the way we’re supposed to think about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ ingredients in the natural hair community. That simple logic — where natural products, especially oils, are the best thing that could happen to your natural hair, and unnatural ingredients like silicones are bad — it kinda breaks down when the drying oils show up.

But could something as innocuous as cold-pressed flax seed oil really have a worse effect on your hair than the likes of Vaseline? To get why these oils can be so problematic, you need to know a little bit more about them. Here’s how they work:

Drying oils: How they dry out your hair

Drying oils don’t actively lift moisture from your hair, like a wicked short chain alcohol would. What they do instead is dry on your hair. While water dries off your hair, turning into vapour and floating away, drying oils are different. They dry by oxidising or reacting with oxygen in the air, and they stick around.

The oils have a unique chemistry that allows them to do this. They’re all high in unsaturated fatty acids with one, two, or three double bonds like oleic, linoleic and linolenic acid, all on one molecular chain.

From the top, oleic acid, linoleic acid and linoleic acid, fatty acids in drying oils. Ben Mills

As they oxidise, these unsaturated bonds crosslink, forming a tangled 3D network. The result is a hard coating that forms relatively quickly and sets on the surface.Ever notice a viscous, sticky layer around the rim of a bottle of flaxseed oil you’ve had for a while? That’s the oxidised version of the flax oil, linoxyn. Exposed to air, flax seed oil dries up. It eventually becomes a gummy solid, almost like an extra seal on the rim.

This is exactly why oils like flaxseed oil are used in painting. On its own, paint takes forever to dry, so to speed up drying time, painters mix in drying oils. Once they’re exposed to air, and spread into a thin film over a surface, the oils become hard and tough and somewhat elastic.

This tough, protective coating with limited flexibility is perfect for a painting, helping the paint to set before gravity or humidity start moving the artwork around. Drying oils also impart the firm, glossy seal that can make an oil painting last hundreds of years.

But your hair is a different story.

Even though the raw oil you might find in a natural hair product won’t have the intense drying power of the boiled flaxseed oil used in industry, that tendency to form a firm seal can leave your strands feeling stiff, brittle and unmanageable.

And hair that’s stripped of flexibility and softness is not the only problem: if the oil is drying enough, and you leave it on for long enough, it can also be harder to shift when you try to wash it out.

The tough buildup that drying oils leave naturally becomes more resistant the longer it’s exposed to oxygen. If you like to leave oils in your hair for days on end (or even longer), you’re increasing the time available for a drying oil to harden on your hair.

The more oxygen a drying oil is exposed to, the stiffer and more stubborn it becomes. Which means you might have your work cut out for you when you do get around to shampooing.

What are semi-drying oils?

Every oil has its own drying rate, depending on the ratio of different fatty acids it contains. Scientists measure this using the oil’s iodine value — the amount of iodine 100g of an oil can absorb. Drying oils like flax seed oil have a high ratio of polyunsaturated fatty acids and so have an iodine value of 130-190+. Article continues below…

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Anything under 100 is a nondrying oil, like olive oil, which has mostly monounsaturated fatty acids. Nondrying oils keep their liquid form for the most part.

Right up in between these two, are the semi-drying oils. The iodine values of semi-drying oils range from 100-130. These oils dry more slowly, and never achieve quite the same solidity that drying oils can get. Both rapeseed and sunflower oil are semi-drying oils.

How stiff or dry can drying oils make your hair?

How stiff these oils can make your hair will partly depend on your hair’s own natural elastic modulus – or stiffness factor. If your hair isn’t naturally very stiff, then drying oils won’t have as dramatic an effect. But the higher your hair’s modulus, the more likely it is that these oils will leave your hair feeling dry and stiff.

And if your hair is already low on moisture, the effects of a drying oil will be more obvious. Much of our hair’s flexibility comes from its water content. Hair that is undermoisturised is already brittle; using drying oils on it will multiply that brittleness.

Using drying oils on hair that is undermoisturised will increase dryness and stiffness. Image by Mwabonje.

Another factor that affects how stiff or dry a drying oil will make your hair feel is time. The longer you leave it in your hair, the drier your hair will feel, as the oil oxidises, creating a barrier that’s increasingly tough, and difficult to penetrate.

How can I wash oils out of my hair?

Non-drying oils like olive oil don’t harden when exposed to air; they stay much closer to their original liquid form. These oils tend to wash out easily, even with co-washing.

Depending on how often you wash your hair, semi-drying oils like sunflower oil oil may not have time to build up that strong cast that gives a lot of people stiffness and buildup.

You can remove these oils with a mild cleanser, use Baba de Caracol Sulphate-Free Shampoo. Even drying oils take a while to set on your hair, so if you’re washing frequently and only using small amounts, they may be less of a problem to remove. With low usage and frequent washing, you should be able to remove them with a gentle shampoo, just like with semidrying oils.

Now this is the worst case scenario: say you’ve used a drying oil and left it in for quite a while. Maybe your hair was in a protective style, and you didn’t really pay it any mind. Now, you notice there’s a firm residue on the surface of your hair, it feels dry and almost glued together in some places.

In this scenario, you’ll definitely need to clarify your hair — with shampoo. But first, gently prise the hair apart; it needs to be detangled before it’s washed or you could make the tangles worse and inflict breakage.

If there is major matting, use a detangling leave in with tons of slip like La Aplanadora Leave In first. That will help separate the strands which the drying oil can knit together. Work your leave in through the tangles one by one; you’ll need to make sure they are all out before you clarify.

Once you’ve detangled, use a clarifying shampoo like atrActiva Anti-Stress Shampoo to remove the drying oil build up. Be warned though: if the film has properly set, you might not be able to get all the residue out in one go.

I’m not using a drying oil. Why is my hair still dry?

Drying oils aside, one common reason why oils can cause dry hair, is using oils on dry hair. A lot of people use oil as a moisturiser, but no oil can do that job singlehandedly.

Moisture only comes from water. If you apply oils on dry hair, then even the silkiest, most softening, non-drying oil could leave your hair feeling dry. That’s because even nondrying oils create a hydrophobic film that can lock out a lot of hydration.

Using oil on dry, dehydrated hair is only going to make it greasy and drier. So unless you’re doing a pre-shampoo oil treatment, only apply oil on wet hair, damp hair or hair that has been moistened with a water-based product. Using oils this way should help you seal in moisture and get soft, hydrated results.

Is coconut oil a drying oil?

Coconut oil is not a drying oil; it doesn’t have the right chemical structure. Coconut oil is composed mostly of saturated fatty acids, while drying oils have higher percentages of unsaturated fatty acids.

Even though it’s not actually a drying oil, lots of people do notice that coconut oil dries out their hair. The reason for this is not known, but there are some clues.

The dry, brittle feeling could be related to the fact that coconut oil is one of very few oils that can actually penetrate the hair shaft, due to its high presence of straight chain fatty acids.

Once inside, it binds to your hair’s own proteins, making their bonds stronger. This should strengthen your hair — and studies show it does — hair treated with coconut oil shows less protein loss after washing.

So why does it make some hair brittle? Could it be because coconut oil makes hair more hydrophobic? Or because the presence of the oil inside the hair shaft makes individual strands feel thicker and stiffer?

Coconut oil is not a drying oil, but does leave some hair dry and brittle. Image by Jonas Ducker.

The fact that coconut oil increases hair’s tensile strength means its stiffness should increase too. For some hair though, too much stiffness can mean a loss of elasticity, which can result in breakage. We see this sometimes with protein treatments, which are designed to strengthen the hair, often by making it stiffer.

If the proteins are too effective at stiffening the hair fibre, the result is increased fragility and breakage, even though the product is supposed to make hair stronger. This over-stiffening effect might be the reason people report dry hair after using coconut oil. But that doesn’t make it a drying oil

— nor does coconut oil does contain protein, in case you were wondering.

What if all oils make my hair stiff and dry?

Oils don’t have to be drying oils to make your hair feel dry.

For some hair, especially extremely low porosity hair, most oils can stiffen strands, making them feel crunchy or rough, whether you apply them on wet hair or not. This could be because the oils can’t bind well to the resistant cuticle on low porosity hair.

On these hair types, nondrying oils can cause many of the same problems as drying oils: buildup, roughness, dehydration and even extreme breakage. If this sounds like your hair, it’s probably time to stop force-feeding your hair oils.

Water-based rather than oil-based products might be the answer if every oil might as well be a drying oil to your hair.

How do I know if an oil is a drying oil or not?

As well as the popular drying oils we’ve mentioned in this article, there are tons of other drying and semi-drying oils; too many to list here.

If you want to be able to spot drying oils that aren’t covered in this article, just download our Drying Oils guide. It breaks down dozens of popular natural oils into drying, semi-drying and nondrying so you know what you’re dealing with. You can get it here.