DIY hair care, take 2

Three years ago, I discovered a recipe for a homemade face wash that I absolutely loved. With only three readily available ingredients (aloe vera gel, honey, and olive oil), it achieved much better results at a lower price than any commercial product I'd tried. It was cruelty free and packaging free. And best of all, I knew it would never be discontinued, which is what seems to happen to any product I like.

Ever since then, I've aspired to find a DIY hair conditioner that would offer these same benefits. I use conditioner as my sole hair care product, both in and out of the shower, so neither a deep conditioner nor a simple apple cider vinegar rinse was going to cut it. I wanted a homemade conditioner I could also comb into damp hair for styling. 

But sadly, there weren't many recipes for this type of product online, and none of the ones I tried worked well at all. Straight coconut oil left my hair greasy and did nothing to tame the frizz; coconut milk left it not only greasy but limp as well. A DIY "Honey Butter Balm" made from coconut oil, honey, and shea butter produced pretty good results on day one, but left my hair bedraggled and limp the next day. And both a DIY flaxseed gel and a similar gel made from oats (for which I can't now locate the recipe) turned my curls into a frizzy, sticky puff of cotton candy, just like every other humectant I've ever tried.

And then one day I came upon this recipe from Pistachio Project. It had just four ingredients: boiled or distilled water, coconut oil, guar gum (a thickener and emulsifier), and essential oils (mainly for fragrance. though you can also use specific oils to fight dandruff or dry scalp). It looked like just what my hair needed: something with plenty of oil, but not straight oil that would just sit on top of my low-porosity hair and give it a greasy sheen. And I already had coconut oil and water, so all I needed was the guar gum.

However, this turned out to be an ingredient you can't just go and buy at the store. None of our local supermarkets had it, nor did the natural food stores in the area. Finally I decided to just try the recipe with xanthan gum, which I had on hand following an experiment with homemade Frappuccino. If that worked, I wouldn't need guar gum. And if it completely failed to work, I wouldn't need to waste any more time messing around with this recipe.

As it turned out, the result was somewhere in the middle. The conditioner came out very thin, even though I'd doubled the amount of coconut oil in it because I felt certain a 1:32 ratio of oil to water wouldn't be enough for my hair. I felt like I had to use a lot of it to make any impression on my hair. And yet, it almost seemed to work. It didn't exactly smooth my hair, but it came closer to doing it than anything else I'd tried — and without making it overly limp or greasy.

So I decided it was worth investing in some guar gum to put this recipe to a proper test. Since I still wasn't sure it would work, I purchased a fairly modest amount: 8 ounces for $5.29 at Vitacost. According to the label, that 8-ounce container had 162 half-teaspoon servings, so that would still be enough to make over 160 batches of the conditioner if it worked — and if it didn't, I was only out around five bucks. (I bundled it in with another order, so the shipping cost was negligible.)

I finally got around to trying it last night. This time, I used a whole tablespoon of coconut oil and added some of my favorite essential oils for fragrance. (I've been making a homemade perfume with four parts sandalwood, two parts vanilla, and one part cinnamon, so I stuck to the same ratio in this.) This produced a thickish mixture that was a bit difficult to pour out of the blender, but it was still a lot easier to make than the shea butter gel. And according to my calculations, it only cost 29 cents for the batch: 9 cents' worth of coconut oil, 3 cents' worth of guar gum, and 17 cents for 14 drops of essential oil.

This morning, after my shower, I applied some to my damp-dried curls, the same way I normally do with store-bought conditioner. Thick as it was, it still felt oddly light and slippery in my hands, not creamy like a regular conditioner, but it wasn't too hard to comb into my hair. Then I attempted to take a picture of the result, which proved easier said than done; I hate the way I look in pictures generally, and selfies come out even worse. I finally ended up putting on a mask so that I could show the hair without having to worry about how my face looked.

And here's the result. Not too bad, right? It's not exactly supermodel hair, but it's neither greasy nor frizzy nor limp. The curls are fairly defined, with a decent amount of body, and even a little bit of shine. And they smell like my own signature fragrance, a feature I can't get from even the priciest store-bought products. It took around two tablespoons of conditioner to get this result, so assuming one batch is two-thirds of a cup (equal to the volume of water I started with), each application costs a little over 5 cents. (By comparison, the Suave conditioner I've been using costs $3.99 for 28 ounces, or about 7.1 cents for a comparable volume.)

Admittedly, this is only a preliminary test. The shea butter leave-in also produced good results on first use, but my hair looked dreadful the next day. So I'll have to use this stuff consistently for at least a week to evaluate the results properly. I might end up deciding to tweak the recipe a little, perhaps adding just a tiny bit of the shea butter I still have left to give the conditioner a bit more substance.

But even if this doesn't turn out to be the ultimate, perfect product for my hair, it is at least a product that I know will always be available, on tap, requiring only about five minutes of work and 29 cents' worth of ingredients. The only plastic packaging waste it will produce is the recyclable PETE jar the guar gum came in, and that won't need to go in the bin for another 161 batches. And the Powers That Be can never, ever discontinue it and snatch it away from me. Ecofrugal Principle #5 (Make It Yourself) for the win!