Tuesday 6 March 2018

Product showdown

I usually buy my conditioners following the rule "Whatever is on sale", and then just grab one of each line out of the brand. So now I have a lot of conditioners from the same brands, but different lines. So today it got me thinking that maybe I should do a comparison for all of those "doubles" so in the future, I will only get the best one at the next sale.

Up for today's comparison:
Lovea Conditioner Shea butter
Lovea Conditioner Argan Oil



I'm going to compare them on a few different factors:
  • First impressions
  • Effect: Shine and manageability
  • Ingredient analysis and interesting ingredients such as "actives": Oils, fruits, keratin, sunscreen

First impressions
Lovea Conditioner Shea butter
Lovea Conditioner Argan Oil
Not much a difference there: Both have a sort of thin and runny consistency and both smell vaguely "clean" with a hint of some sort of fruit. Both are easy to distribute, but both are annoying with the pump action. With both, I screwed the pump off and poured the product into my hair. This might work for those with less hair than me, but for me it was seriously annoying.

Effect
Lovea Conditioner Shea butter

Argh. Holy crap, did this thing suck!
As soon as I started rinsing, it gave my hair a really weird effect from root to tips: Sort of like if my hair had a crazy attack of super static. It wasn't tangles, more like all the hairs clung together. When I started detangling from one side, it would stick together from the other side as soon as I had finished. It also left some sort of strange "dry" feeling to my hair, even when wet. This weird effect was only underlined by my hair suddenly being really noisy and making a screeeeeeetcccccch noise when I pulled (forced) my comb through. It was really weird and upsetting!
I hurried to put some coney serum in my hair before even attempting to towel dry it and detangle further.
Poor hair!

I do have to admit though: It made my hair pretty shiny.

Lovea Conditioner Argan Oil
This made my hair slightly less pissed off, but I did also leave it on for shorter because my hair hated the shea butter one so much. Uhm.



Ingredient analysis

Lovea Conditioner Shea Butter
Aqua (Water), Glyceryl Stearate, Cetyl Alcohol, Cetrimonium Chloride, Butyrospermum Parkii Butter, Panthenol, Parfum (Fragrance), Methyl Hydroxyethylcellulose, Ceteareth-20, Bht, Magnesium Nitrate, Pantolactone, Ci 19140, Ci 15985, Methylchloroisothiazolinone, Magnesium Chloride, Methylisothiazolinone, Alpha-Isomethyl Ionone, Benzyl Salicylate, Hexyl Cinnamal, Linalool.
What did my hair hate this so much??
It seems to have a sort of protein overload reaction, but I see no protein in there?

Applying the Beauty Brains "First five ingredients rule"
With the first five ingredients, this is just a carrier for the shea butter. Nothing specially noteworthy there.

Interesting ingredients
Shea butter, panthenol and sunscreen. I do love my sunscreen so points for that.


21 ingredients in total
1 marked as a "2" for acne-trigger. 5 %

1 marked as a "2" for irritation-trigger. 5 %

9 marked as "green" for safety. 42 %
8 marked as "yellow" for safety. 38 %
2 marked as "red" for safety. 9 %
And one marked as "green-yellow" for safety. 5 %

Lovea Conditioner Argan Oil
Aqua (Water), Glyceryl Stearate, Cetyl Alcohol, Cetrimonium Chloride, Panthenol, Methyl Hydroxyethylcellulose, Parfum (Fragrance), Argania Spinosa Kernel Extract, Ceteareth-20, Bht, Magnesium Nitrate, Pantolactone, Ci 19140, Ci 15985, Methylchloroisothiazolinone, Magnesium Chloride, Methylisothiazolinone, Benzyl Salicylate, Coumarin, Hexyl Cinnamal, Linalool.

Applying the Beauty Brains "First five ingredients rule"
With the first five ingredients, this is just a carrier for the panthenol. Nothing specially noteworthy there.

Interesting ingredients
Panthenol, argan oil and sunscreen. I do love my sunscreen so points for that.

21 ingredients in total
1 marked as a "2" for acne-trigger. 5 % 

1 marked as a "2" for irritation-trigger. 5 %

9 marked as "green" for safety. 42%
7 marked as "yellow" for safety. 33 %
3 marked as "red" for safety. 14 %
And one marked as "green-yellow" for safety. 5 %

Lady Igor says
I can't say I really liekd any of these, or would recommend them. But I guess since Lovea Conditioner Argan Oil pissed my hair off the least, this is the one I would pick if I had to pick one.
Meh. Not impressed.

3 comments:

  1. Do you know which ingredient(s) cause the weird feeling? I get the exact same pretty often, usually from deep conditioning treatments and I've a hairtype very similar to you. My boyfriend has this all the time and I can't figure out which conditioner could help him. He has very coarse, but also very brittle hair and it seems to hate everything, especially itself.

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    Replies
    1. let your boyfriend avoid greasy products; i suspect too much waxes stay on his hair,and no moisture come in (capillary occlusion)
      he ought use a sci shampoo bar, and for detangler, a very light parsley decoction ( one leaf in 100 ml water) in a spray bottle as leave in conditioner; he can also spray on the brush

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    2. Honestly, I have no idea. My only ideas are that either this is due to protein, which this hairtype dislikes in large amounts, or due to buildup, but that would be odd since I didn't have that reaction before or after?
      I've been trying to find some answers online, but there is very little "hair science" to be found out there for knowledge like this. Most people seem to suggest that the weird feeling is because of a product penetrating too deeply and messing up the outer layers when doing that. But that makes very little sense to me, because shouldn't that be what a product is designed to do to begin with? Would you formulate a product that deliberately makes your hair feel bad, but penetrates deeply? Such a product should fall off a market in no time, right?
      I guess a point to doing product comparisons like this is, now we have the ingredient list and written evidence of "that pissy feeling" up here and if it happens again, we can go back and compare ingredient lists and effect. Meh. Coarse hair can be so difficult!

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