Is it Necessary To Apply Conditioner After Shampoo?

Conditioner is important to use after shampoo. You should use a conditioner that is designed for your hair type.

Why do we need conditioner?

Our hair is negatively charged so we need to use something which has a positive charge which we find in our conditioner.

Positively charged ingredients adsorb to our hair. This means that it will cling to the surface of our hair. It's water resistant to a large degree so will not wash away with water alone. It sticks around until the next wash.

These positively charged ingredients are surfactants in the form of cationic quaternary compounds. They are what make a conditioner, well, condition. These are the chemicals that people say you should avoid in your hair products. How are you to avoid them in a conditioner? Without them it's a hair lotion and not a conditioner!

Conditioners are usually acidic to be more like hair. Even a ph balanced shampoo at ph 5.5 is balanced to our skin and not our hair. It's going to open up our cuticle so we need to help close it with our acidic conditioner.

Some people use an acidic rinse and claim it works in place of conditioner. It doesn't. It does one job that your conditioner does. Just one.

Some people claim you can use oils in place of conditioners. You can't. Oils don't condition our hair.

The chemicals that condition our hair are what help to build the hair and strengthen it. They make our hair less static, easier to comb and more pliable so less prone to breakage.

Conditioner includes fatty alcohols which help the conditioning chemicals to be more effective.

Hydrolised proteins fill in gaps in our hair and silicones or oils will offer a coating that seals all the nice stuff in to prevent it escaping and leave our hair prone to damage.

Before I truly understood what made a conditioner work I tried for months to make my own. I didn't know that a conditioner needed positively charged ingredients to make it a conditioner.

I had many failed attempts by making what turned out to be a nice lotion with quite a high percentage of oils in it. My hair was horrible and oily. So when I learnt the true meaning of a conditioner and how it works it was a light bulb moment for me.

I dropped the oils and added BTMS 50 which is an excellent conditioning ingredient. Hey presto! I had myself the best conditioner I had ever used.

When you read somewhere that you can use oils in place of conditioner or eggs or onion juice or any other concoction, ignore it. They are wrong. These things are not conditioners.

You can't go and buy the ingredients in a local store to make a real conditioner so buy a conditioner from the store instead. It doesn't have to be expensive or fancy but it does need to be a real conditioner. Your hair needs it.