Hair styling geekery...

...featuring Michael Douglas (hair, not actor) on hair styling ingredients & why your shampoo probably can't give you the volume that you want, plus some other people I like and you might too...

Hair styling ingredients: a brief lowdown

So I promised you this a few weeks ago and I finally pinned down hair stylist Michael Douglas to talk to him about something that he mentioned to me aeons ago, way before the recent launch of his hair styling range, The Numbers. He had pointed out that everyone is au fait with skincare ingredients but — apart from silicones — nobody really talks about what’s in hair styling products. And if they did, they might buy better products / get better results from them. So I decided to get him talking on what’s in hair styling products…

We started off by setting the record straight about shampoos.

“For me, shampoo is just like mild detergent,” says Michael. “It cleans your hair. That’s what it does. Stop expecting it to do all the other things.”

I mean, I’m kind of with him. Although I’d go even further and say it’s largely for cleaning your scalp and your hair gets cleaned to the extent that it needs cleaning when you rinse the shampoo off your scalp. Anyway, he went on to say that that is why he is more interested in hair styling and ingredients that create volume and body — “none of that is in shampoo no matter what they say.”

Michael then explained that, to his mind, there are two types of ingredient in hairstyling:

“At one end of the spectrum you have the oil- or silicone-based products, that make hair feel soft and shiny, supple and smooth. But there’s no hold in that, no volume in that, it doesn’t give the longevity. Then, at the other end of the scale, you’ve got these things called co-polymers or resins — VP/VA copolymers [a variety of combinations of polyvinylpyrrolidone and vinyl acetate] — polyquaternium-37 is another of them. These are the things that people often find can make their hair go crispy, hard and stiff.”

According to Michael, where you want your hair to be is bang in the middle of the two. So you have hold and longevity but also hair that’s shiny, frizz-free and feels like hair, rather than straw.

The silicone question

A quick aside…the sort of thing where I feel like this platform doesn’t do quite what I want it to do. Because in print this would be a box on the page, but here it’s either got to go in the middle like this, kind of as a quote, or stranded at the end when you’ve forgotten that we talked about silicones all those paragraphs ago. Anyway…

Me: What do you think about silicones?

MD: I don’t have any problem with silicones at all. When people say “Is it silicone-free?” I’m like “Why are you bothered?” And they might be bothered about the environment or plastics in the ocean. But they’re all water soluble so they break down with water. There’s nothing in them that can’t be dissolved away. And the amount of them is so minuscule that I think there are millions of other things you should worry about. And hair silicones like dimethicones are brilliant. They do a brilliant job and nobody’s stumbled across better versions of them since they first started being used in hair styling products in 1989.

These two different types of ingredient are why Michael says that whenever you style your hair, for a really good style that’s going to last, and look good, you want two products, because they need to do two different things at different points in the styling process, and they can’t be stabilised within the same formulation.

“This is how I approach everyone’s hair,” he says. “I tend to layer them. I’ll put the oily one on first, and then the resin-based product that seals in the oily bit, and forms a flexible film over the hair, drying to create a barrier between the atmosphere and the hair.”

Moisture is the enemy of all hairstyles, Michael tells me. And now he’s speaking my language. I can have the most beautiful smooth professional blow-dry, and then step outside into the slightest humidity and it’s a frizzy, curly mess within minutes.

For Michael, the answer to my problems is a heat-activated polymer that’s applied before drying or tonging. “The heat of the tong makes the water evaporate, extracting moisture from the hair, and then it moulds the film onto the hair. When the hair cools, the strand should be shinier, more protected and will hold its shape better.”

Michael’s new hair styling range, The Numbers

Obviously I asked him if there are certain oils or silicones that he’d recommend for different hair types, but unfortunately it’s not as simple as that.

“Oils and silicones do the same thing, but some formulations are heavier than others. For some people that’s great. If you’ve got thick, bushy hair, you want something heavy that will hold it down. But if you’ve got really fine hair, and put the same thing on it, it will just look greasy.”

And sadly the same ingredients can behave very differently.

“There are two different products that I’ve used in the past that have exactly the same ingredients — in a slightly different order. With one of them the hair didn’t feel remotely oily or greasy, with the other I got a really greasy result. So it’s not just about the ingredients, it’s about the amount of them — and the amount of product that you put on the hair. And how wet your hair is when you apply the product as that will dilute the formulation a bit.”

That’s why, according to Michael, it’s so easy to get products wrong

“The product doesn’t factor in the user and it doesn’t factor in the hair type,” he says. “It’s just a product. It can’t adjust itself. I feel that there are no bad products out there, there’s just the wrong hair type, or someone using the wrong amount. And the problem is people often don’t know themselves what it is their hair needs.”

Essentially there are lots of variables, even before you factor in human error and people’s expectations — which can also vary.

“People often say ‘I’ve been using this product for a while but it’s stopped working.’ But perhaps the habits of the person using it have changed. Perhaps their expectations have changed. This idea that your hair gets used to certain ingredients is just not true. But psychologically you can get used to a product, and be disappointed when it hasn’t performed in the way that you expect it to.”

This conversation led on to me bemoaning the fact that I kind of wanted to be a curly girl method girl but that there did seem to be so many variables, both in terms of product, and the way that you apply it and it seemed to require so much more trial and error in a way I just — honestly — can’t be arsed with. “Why is hair SO much trickier than skin?” I asked “Or is it just me?”

Me trying to embrace my natural curls… before giving up (because figuring this shit out is too much like hard work) and instead going back to blasting them with heat and then using a tong to make the curls more even. I know, C+, must try harder.

Turns out, it’s not just me.

“Every time you walk into a room, the moisture content in that room is different,” says Michael. “Every time you walk outside from one day to the next, the atmosphere is completely different. Whether it’s a bit damp or even a bit warm or cold or dry, all of that is a problem for your hair.”

And so, I ask, is it just that skin is some how more resilient to these fluctuation in a way that your hair isn’t?

“Yes! And the reason for that is that your skin is alive, and is in this kind of homeostatic state. It can adjust. So your body can go ‘ooh, it’s cold, I’m just going to allow the skin to shrink a bit’ or ‘it’s very warm so we’ll sweat a bit so that will cool us down.’ But your hair is dead. It’s not connected to your biology at all. It’s slowly getting older, and drier, and worse, but it can’t adjust itself.”

(And, yes it’s a bit more complicated than that — as anyone whose scalp / hair has changed during puberty/pregnancy/menopause can tell you, but ultimately, the lengths of your hair are biologically useless, in a way that your skin isn’t.)

That was my “OMG wow” moment. The line I was thinking about when a few weeks ago I posted a little note about this interview…

Maybe it’s not a wow moment for you. Maybe you’re like “how the actual f*ck have you been writing about beauty for more than 20 years and this really obvious thing had not occurred to you?” In my defence I thought — as I often do, it turns out (yup, it’s that same Taylor lyric again) — I was the problem, and that I just got lucky with relatively well-behaved skin and unlucky being a cack-handed loser with a hairdryer and brush who just couldn’t master her problem hair.

But no, it’s biology and the difference between dead hair and live skin.

Anyway, the tl;dr version of this is: for a good hairstyle that lasts you need at least two products, one with oil or silicones (look for ingredients that have the letters “cone” or
“oxane” in them) for shine and slip and silkiness. And the other with copolymer ingredients (that probably have the letters “vinyl” or “poly” in them) for hold and volume. The bad news is, those products will differ depending on what your hair is like and what you want to achieve (and from my POV the weather and the whims of the gods) and you may have to experiment to get it right. (And if, for whatever it’s worth, you want some examples of my favourite styling products, stay tuned, I’ve got a hair-styling empties post incoming soon.)

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I like these people, you might too…

Part of the reason that I wanted to start writing a newsletter was because I didn’t feel I had the opportunity to write the sort of beauty features that I wanted to in more traditional media. What I had entirely naively underestimated was how this platform would serve me the sort of beauty features that I really want to read and hadn’t realised existed (mostly because I hadn’t been looking for them here.)

I’ve really had a couple of proper “ah, I have found my people” moments on here recently and, working on the assumption that if you’re reading this newsletter, you might share my interests, I wanted to flag a handful of discoveries that I’ve made over the last few weeks…

Cheryl Wischhover is one of those people whose work I’ve known about and admired for a while. And if you’re a beauty geek, you probably know her too. She’s a freelance beauty journalist who’s written for Business of Fashion, New York Times, Vox, FT, Allure and many more, and her newsletter is Good For Your Age (which as she put it “ I like that when you see the words all mushed together, it can be read as “Good For You Rage.”) and I think if you’re Gen X and into no-bullshit beauty, you’ll like her.

Through Cheryl, I’ve discovered AM Guarnieri and Trucco Journal and I very much enjoyed her deep dive into the Byredo story. Also, and this is worth saying, they are both journalists writing informative, funny shit. Because there are a handful of other really smart beauty industry people I’m finding on here but their stuff reads like it’s been AI generated. And maybe it hasn’t and maybe we’re all just writing more like AI now. (If THIS interests you then you should definitely check out Naomi Alderman on here because she writes and reposts a lot of interesting stuff on that topic and it was via her that I came across this paper about how AI is influencing language.)

Moving on. Via Jojo Moyes this week I discover Rachel Lowenstein’s long but very worth reading exploration of The Hot Girl Arms Race which struck a LOT of chords with me and maybe I’ll dive into my feelings around feminisim, beauty, hypocrisy and responsibility in more detail another time. But that essay, in turn, put Nina Pool on my radar (which given how many followers she has on TikTok and Instagram it’s a bit embarrasing that she wasn’t on it before.) She talks a lot about dupes — again something I have a lot to say about, but that’s for another time — but seems generally ingredient and industry savvy.

Camille Moore looks at the industry from a very different standpoint. And, regardless on your views on Medicube’s products, (I have quite a lot but am still forming others) I found her Branding With Benefits newsletter on their social media approach interesting and instructive.

And finally, while I’m on intros. You know Alexis and Christina, The Lipstick Lesbians, right? (Also on Instagram) who excitingly this week announced that they are launching a brand. Leaked Labs will bring manufacturing samples to market and tweak according to feedback before distributing or ditching them. It’s a really new and different business model and their first product — flexible powder — has got me really excited about the concept.

I am sure I will continue to discover and enjoy more new like-minded types (as well as people who I knew before, such as Ruth Crilly, Jacqueline Kilikita and Emma Gunavardhana. And people like Tori whose scathing (in a good way) takes on the UK beauty and PR industry I’ve been enjoying. And BritishBeautyBlogger who’s an old school blogger and posts an incredible volume of stuff on newness and much more besides) and I’ll continue to let you know about them too.

Oh and this isn’t a newsletter but OMFG, this about what’s in / not in counterfeit beauty products from NYT’s Wirecutter is a) jaw-dropping and b) exactly the sort of thing that UK newspapers used to do and just don’t any more, which is sad.

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Until next time…

Note: I only enthuse about products I really rate, but I can earn commission on products I mention here. If you hate the idea of this, please let me know, as this is very much a work in progress and nothing is set in stone.