Tina is troubled…Does It Factor quick blowdry shampoo really make hair dry faster?
The Beauty Brains respond:
“It Factor” is a salon brand owned by Niche Beauty, LLC. The line includes 3 “Quick BlowDry” products: It Factor Quick Blowdry shampoo, Quick Blowdry conditioner and Simply It Blowdry lotion. The claim for all three products is that the “Vaporboost® System reduces drying time.”
Feasibility of reducing drying time
This is one of those “holy grail” claims in hair care and we know from personal experience that some of the biggest beauty companies in the world have worked on this with no success. The notion that a small salon company could succeed where dedicated R&D departments have failed is implausible to say the least. But, to be fair, we reached to the company to give them a chance to explain how their product works. We received no response.
There’s not much information on the company website either, but we did find this explanation of how the products work: the Vaporboost system “reduces the attraction between the hair shaft and water to speed up the natural evaporation of water from the hair.” This sounds suspiciously like an “azeotrope” which is a solvent that mixes with water, speeding its evaporation. It’s tough to conceive of a shampoo being able to deliver this but the Simply It lotion might be able to. However, this would only likely affect the surface water on the hair and not the moisture that has been absorbed INTO the hair which is what takes so long to evaporate when you’re drying your hair.
Finally, they don’t list their ingredients online and we couldn’t find them on any other site anywhere. So it’s pretty much impossible to give a solid technical assessment. According to a review on the Polish Insomniac, we did find that dimethicone is a main ingredient in the lotion. If mixed with cyclopentasiloxane, that could help some water “sheet” off the hair faster. But any product with this combination of silicones should do this just as well. There’s no need to spend more money on an expensive salon product.
The Beauty Brains bottom line
As Arthur C. Clarke once said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Based on our hair care experience, it’s highly unlikely that these products work better than anything else. However, we’d be glad to revisit this subject if the company ever responds to our inquiry. If anyone out there has tried this product, leave a comment and share your experience with the rest of the Beauty Brains community.