 Hey everyone, I'm Bianca Renee and you're watching Bianca Renee today and today I'm gonna talk about all the horrible things that could be lurking inside of your shampoo, conditioner and favorite curly hair products. Don't worry, I've done my research and I'm gonna tell you exactly what is and what is not supposed to be inside of your curly hair products. Now you might be someone that grabs a bottle at the store and you look on the back, you try to read all the ingredients, try to see if something, you know, is dangerous for your curls, but there's a lot of big words on there. You don't really know what half of these mean, not to mention the font size is like three. So I'm gonna tell you about the main ones that you should be looking for. I'm not gonna tell you about every single ingredient ever made for hair products because then this would be a very long and boring science class. Now personally when I look at a conditioner, shampoo or styling product, it usually says right on the front, no sulfates, silicone and paraben free. But if you don't know what those words mean, it's just like okay. So today I'm gonna explain exactly what sulfates, silicone and paraben are and what they do exactly for your hair and for the product itself. So I want to start with the most popular thing that we always hear, which is sulfates. What is sulfate and what's the big deal? Sulfate is a lathering agent. So you know when you go put shampoo in your hair and it's all bubbly and sudsing up, the fact that it's sudsing up means that that's the sulfate. That's what's making that bubbly sensation happen. So you're probably thinking, so I like the bubbles. Bubbles are fun! No, they're actually secretly ruining your hair. If you curly or natural hair, the sulfates are actually stripping out any natural protein and natural oils that we need in our hair to keep that moisture. The problem is it's a very harsh cleaning agent. It's too harsh for our hair. Sulfates are also found in engine degreaser, car wash soaps and floor cleaners. Now, although floor cleaner like Sabuloso is the best smelling floor cleaner ever made, I'm not gonna wash my hair with it. But it does smell really good and it's like a dollar. So I know you guys should get this for your floor. All right, let's get started. You need to first go to your shower, grab your shampoo or one of your favorite hair products and let's see if these guys are even worthy enough to be in your beautiful curls. Come on. Don't be lazy. Go get them. Come on. Come on. Okay. Now that you have your product, I feel like Dorothy Explorer because like half of you probably didn't actually get it and I'm like, what's the answer? That's right! But anyways, if you did go get the product, go ahead and look on the back and we're gonna look for sulfates. I'm gonna cut to my favorite mall. This mall has a target, which is the best target I've ever been to. It has two sides. I'm an entire aisle of curly hair products. I'll just show you the footage. Okay guys, I'm currently at the best target in the world, the one in Culver City. We have an entire aisle of natural hair products. You know what we have in the valley? Maybe three products max. But here, we have both sides. So they're probably what you're holding in your hand. Now depending on which one you have, it should say what it has or it does not have right on the front of the bottle in a nice little list. I like when companies do this because it makes it really easy to see that it's silicone-free, sulfate-free and paraben-free. Now if it's not on the front, then we're gonna look on the back and see exactly what's inside and we're gonna look for three specific types of sulfate. The first one is Sodium Laurel Sulfate, also written as SLS. The next one is Sodium Laurel Sulfate, which is S-L-E-S. Another common one is Ammonium Laurel Sulfate, which is written as A-L-S, or Ammonium Laurel Sulfate, which is A-L-E-S. If you see any of these on the bottle, you might want to throw it away because it's creating frizz, dandruff, split ends and making your hair extra dry. Alright and now for the sad truth of the popular Dove Advanced Tear series. This is the Dove product that was supposed to be all for us curly girls. If you grab the shampoo and check on the back, you will see that the second item on there says Sodium Laurel Sulfate and then you scroll down a couple more lines and there's Sodium Sulfate again. So this Dove series is not a sulfate-free shampoo. Bummer! Something else I'd like to point out is for example the Carol's Daughter Black Vanilla Sulfate-Free Shampoo. It says Sulfate-Free right on the front, but when you go on the back and check the ingredients, the second one on there says Dysodium Laurel Sulfo succinent. Although it looks very similar to our new vocabulary word of Sodium Laurel Sulfate, it's actually quite different. It doesn't contain the actual sulfate ion, therefore it's still a sulfate-free shampoo. Alright so that's all you really need to know about the sulfates. Now although shampoo has sulfates, a lot of conditioners and styling products has silicones. Silicone is used to make our hair shiny. Sounds like a good thing, right? But the problem with it, silicones tend to build up really really easily. So when we have product build up, that is going to affect our scalp, which is going to affect our hair growth and it's going to build up and look like dandruff. And those are all things we don't want. Now the easiest way to spot some type of silicone in your product is to look for words that end with the word cone. Now although it is best to avoid silicones in general, there are some silicones that aren't as bad as others. For example, dimethicone is a silicone that is able to dissolve in water, so that means it's very lightweight and it will leave very little build up. Where on the other hand, ammo dimethicone is not water soluble, so it's not going to dissolve in water and now you're going to need a very good clarifying shampoo to remove that build up and it's going to make your hair feeling real heavy and weighed down. Now let's go ahead and check one more bottle while I'm here and I'm going to grab a Garnier Fruits bottle and right on the front it does not say those little magic words that we're looking for, so let's go ahead and check the back. Now when you check the back, bam! Second thing on there, sodium laureth sulfate, sodium laurel sulfate, and right underneath that it says dimethicone, so that's two sulfates and silicone in this one product. This is not the best product for our curls. And the final one is parabens. Now after I did my research, I was actually surprised to see that parabens don't really have a direct effect on our hair. They're not really drying it out or doing anything like that, but parabens are used as a preservative to make sure there's no mold or like fungus inside of our bottles. Now if our products don't have any type of preservative in them, we wouldn't be able to be product junkies because our whole stash of product would just be rotten in the corner. Parabens make our products last longer, so instead of parabens to keep our products fresh, a nice alternative is phenoxyethanol. Phenoxyethanol. Phenoxyethanol. Now I'm speaking different languages. I'm just going to write it there. That word, yeah, that's a good alternative. But after a lot of research, parabens have been seen to disrupt hormones. So it's not really affecting our hair, but because it's using our hair to get into our body, it could have some side effects on the body. There's still a lot of studies going around on it, nothing like too extreme right now, but it's just not a good thing to have in our hair if we can avoid it. In order to spot parabens on your product bottles, you actually see the word parabens somewhere within the word, and I'm going to put a link that has more of these terms so you guys can check it out in the description box. I've now been in this one aisle for 30 minutes. Any minute target is probably going to call security on me for a suspicious activity like this girl's been in the aisle for 30 minutes, someone should go check on her. Now these are just three of the main ingredients that I know we should avoid on our natural hair products, but if you know of some other ingredients or chemicals that we for sure should be avoiding, go ahead and leave a comment so we all can work together to get the perfect products for our curls. Before you go, remember to follow me on Instagram at MsBeyondGrenet and give this video a thumbs up and subscribe. I post new videos every Sunday and you don't want to miss a video, right? So you should totally subscribe. Just push it, just just push it. But I will see you guys next week. Thanks for watching Beyond Grenet today.