Do Vitamins In TIGI Bed Head Reconstruct Your Hair?

Kate’s question…What do you think about TIGI Bed Head products? Some of these conditioners and shampoos claim to have mega vitamins A,B,C,D,E and reconstruct your hair.
The Right Brain’s response:
Kate, you’re just lucky that I’m answering this one instead of the Left Brain. There’s nothing Left loves more than to bash cosmetics with vitamins! I’ll be a little bit nicer. A little bit, but not much!

Let’s take a look at Bed Head’s ingredients (we’ll use their Self Absorbed Mega Vitamin Conditioner as an example). Here’s what’s in it:

Bed Head ingredients

Deionized Water, Cetearyl Alcohol, Behentrimonium Methosulfate, Glyceryl Stearate, PEG 100 Stearate, Trimethylsilyamodimethicone, Octoxynol 40, Isolaureth 6, Cetyl Alcohol, Stearalkonium Chloride, Dicetyldimonium Chloride, Stearyl Alcohol, Fragrance, Cetrimonium Chloride, Aloe Barbadensis Gel, Retinyl Palmitate, Magnesium Ascorbyl Phosphate (Vitamin C), Ergocalciferol (Vitamin D), Tocopheryl Acetate (Vitamin E), Panthenol (Vitamin B), Cyclomethicone, Dimethiconol, Hydroxyethylcellulose, Citric Acid, Disodium EDTA, Imidazolidinyl Urea, Methylparaben, Propylparaben, FD&C Yellow 5, FD&C Red 40

It does contain vitamins A, B, C, D, and E as they claim – here’s what they look like:

Vitamin A = Retinyl Palmitate
Vitamin B5 = Panthenol
Vitamin C = Magnesium Ascorbyl Phosphate
Vitamin D = Ergocalciferol
Vitamin E = Tocopherol acetate

Mega-nificent vitamins?

But are these vitamins “mega” and do they do anything for your hair? First, you’ll notice that all the vitamins appear toward the end of the ingredient list. That’s because ingredients must be listed in descending order of concentration. If there’s a lot of an ingredient in the formula it will appear early in the list and therefore stuff that’s toward the end of the list is usually present at very low levels. So what? Well, since all the vitamins appear late in the list, that means there aren’t high levels of vitamins in the formula. That’s not very “Mega” now is it?

Second, even though there are vitamins in the formula they do not reconstruct your hair, in fact, they don’t do ANY thing for hair. While vitamins are essential for the metabolism of living cells, they really don’t do anything when applied to hair because it’s dead. The rest of the formula (especially the behentrimonium methosulfate and the cyclomethicone) will do a fine job of conditioning your hair so we’re not saying this is a bad conditioner. We’re not saying don’t buy this product just because they tell you it’s a “Mega” vitamin formula.