Tamar asks…Is there any real benefit to pre-pooing? I want to try products like Burts Bee’s Avocado Butter pre shampoo treatment, but i don’t want to waste my money. I’ve heard great things about it, but to me it would seem like I would just be washing out all of the beneficial ingredients.
The Right Brain replies:
First it was regular shampoo, then it was no poo ( washing your hair with conditioner), and now it’s pre-poo. What’s next post-poo?
What is pre-poo?
The idea of protecting your hair by loading it up with oily materials before shampooing actually makes some sense. (There’s a similar approach in skin care called “super-fatting.”) If you saturate the hair with oil, it will “overwhelm” your shampoo to some degree and you won’t strip your hair as much during this wash cycle. In other words the shampoo uses up its oil cleansing ability before stripping all the oil out of your hair. This is especially true for oils that penetrate hair like coconut oil. Of course the danger with this type of heavy oil treatment is that it might leave your hair feeling more greasy and weighed down more than you like. You could lather, rinse, repeat to get rid of any oily residue but this defeats the purpose of using the pre-poo in the first place.
Is Burts Bees a good pre-poo?
Let’s take a look at the ingredients:
Glycerin, olea europaea (olive) fruit oil, avena sativa (oat) kernel protein, perseaue gratissima (avocado) oil, prunus amygdalus dulcis (sweet almond) oil, lanolin, tocopherol, urtica dioica (nettle) leaf powder, rosmarinus officinalis (rosemary) powder, chlorophyll, fragrance.
Notice that the third ingredient is a protein. Proteins are not very soluble and so if they are used at higher levels (1% or so) they need to be suspended or used in emulsion-type products. Since this product appears to be a mixture of oily materials, we would assume the protein is used at less than 1%. If this is true then the next ingredient down the list, the avocado oil, is present at an even lower level. It seems a bit of a stretch to call this product an “avocado butter” if the only actual avocado it contains just a pinch of its oil. But that’s typical marketing for you.
Anyway, there’s plenty of olive oil for this product to work just fine as a good pre-poo. But then again, you could get basically the same effect just by using olive oil mixed with a little glycerine to cut the greasiness. You can buy both of these pretty cheaply if you want to try a do it yourself version. But if you’re going to all that trouble you’re probably better off just using coconut oil.
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Now I want to be a chemist.
How was I supposed to know that stuff about protein. Now I just look at the first 3 ingredients and ignore all the rest.
@Rae: We are SO thrilled to that you want to be a chemist. That’s what sharing information on The Beauty Brains is all about!
BTW, it’s not always quite as simple as looking at just the first few ingredients. It depends on the type of product. In this particular case, the first 3 happen to be the most important. (You’ll learn all this once you become a chemist…)
HA! Awesome! This article vindicates my routine (2 years of oiling with coconut oil a few hours before conditioner-only washing) which has given me the best results of my life. I’m sick of people thinking I’m nuts. Mind you, it very much depends on the ingredients in the conditioner – mine’s mostly water, cetearyl alcohol and cetrimonium chloride.
I’ve also noticed that more sebum is removed by the conditioner-only method when I rub my scalp with coconut oil beforehand. Does the coconut oil mix with sebum to make it more readily soluble in cleaning agents?
Whats the chorophyll in there for? Photosynthesis?
Great information, thanks for the tips…will be trying out the coconut oil next time!
http://bowtiedbeauty.blogspot.com/
The Burt’s Bees Avacado pre-conditioner is sublime. I try moisturizing conditioners fanatically and this is the best. Leave it in for most of your shower-the longer the better. I’ve been having trouble finding it in stores lately.
I prepoo with Olive Oil – I know coconut oil is even better, but JC from thenauralhaven suggests coconut takes hours to penetrate into the hair, so I just stick to Olive.
I first heard about this 5 years ago when I was travelling in India, and my hair was feeling rough from the sun and heat. Someone told me Indian women put Jasmine oil on their hair prior to shampooing. It didn’t make sense to me, but I tried it anyway, and my hair came out much softer + moisturised.
Thanks so much for answering my question!!
Hmm I’ve been using coconut oil as a pre-shampoo treatment (guh, I hate the word “pre-poo.” Makes me think of POOOP!)
But now that I read above it takes hours to penetrate the hair, I should probably apply it earlier or just use olive oil if I am in a hurry.
I still want to try the Burts Bees Pre-Shampoo treatment because it might make my hair smell nicer than just using Olive oil and glycerin.