And why is mens and womens shampoo so different.
In: Chemistry
I’m natural (African American) And even our shampoo differ from the shampoo sold outside of the ethnic aisle. The sulfate found in typical shampoo strips our hair of the natural oils. So we usually look for sulfate free shampoo. About once or twice a month we’ll wash with “regular” shampoo to get a good cleanse. We usually follow that with a deep condition and hot oil treatment.
This is a great podcast that goes into the history of soap and will explain the answer to your question as well: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-stuff-you-should-know-26940277/episode/how-soap-works-69248640/
There IS a difference between shampoos, body, and hand soaps. One difference that I haven’t seen mentioned is that shampoos AREN’T meant to be as strong and work differently than a dish soap for example.
One DOESN’T want a shampoo to be that strong as to remove all of the oils from your scalp as these oils are needed for your hair and scalp to be healthy. If you’re using something like dish detergent or laundry detergent you’re stripping the oils that a shampoo will leave behind.
Soapmaker here: shower gel and shampoo actually gave more in common with each other than soap. Real soap is made of fats saponified by lye. This is generally better for your skin (depending on the fats used) because of the leftover fats and the glycerin byproduct of the process (glycerine draws moisture to the skin).
Handmade soaps are better than mass produced, because mass produced soaps strip out most of the glycerin fur other uses.
Shower gel and shampoo and the like are made with surfactants. These are basically detergents, and bubble a lot (we are lead to believe bubbles=clean). The shampoo bars a lot of companies sell are actually really bad for your scalp. They are basically cakes of surfactant, and can be very drying to the scalp.
There are soap based shampoo bars, but they have to be made of certain fats, and can take some adjusting.
Legally, they can’t call it soap if it’s not made like soap, hence why a lot of commercial “soaps” are called “body bars.”
Two ways to tell if it’s real soap: 1. It will say soap right on the front, or 2. Look for the names of the saponified oils. Soap is a kind of salt/sodium, so saponified coconut oil would be sodium cocoate; saponified palm oil would be sodium palmitate; saponified tallow would be sodium tallowate, and so on.
Hope that helps. I’m new to this reddit, so hopefully, I explained things simply enough.
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