French and Curly

Hi curly girls,

It is summertime, and I slowed down a bit on my hair care. I mean, who wants to sit home with a conditioning cap on when the sun calls you outside?

I'm still doing the bare minimum. And as usual, when I say "bare minimum", I mean at least conditioner.

For this summer, I picked my belooooooved Urtekram aloe vera conditioner. Thank you Séverine for telling me about it!  

Price/volume:

It coasts around $ 10 (or 6.5 GBP) for 8.5 Oz, which is a good bargain. The bottle is compact and doesn't take a lot of place. It actually looks smaller that it is. The website www.mondebio.fr ships worldwide (US shipping costs are around $20 for a huge parcel, and I never had custom fees).

Texture/smell:

It is really fluid and easy to spread in the hair. The smeel is light, fresh, with a hint of herbal scent. For my UK and US readers, used to heavily scented products, it will probably have no smell at all.

Ingredients

Aqua, aloe barbadensis leaf extract*, glycerin**,  cetearyl alcohol, coco-caprylate, glyceryl caprylate, lecithin, olus oil, sodium cetearyl sulfate, cetyl alcohol, glyceryl stearate se, cymbopogon schoenanthus oil*, citrus aurantium dulcis peel oil*, citric acid, magnolia officinalis bark extract, tocopherol, beta-sitosterol, squalene, citral, limonene

The product is Curly Girl friendly, and contains a cleansing surfactant (sodium cetearyl sulfate) at a low concentration. It is cleansing enough to cowash between regular shampoos. And it is gentle enough to keep it in hair as a leave in.

It doesn't have any quaternary ammonium salts (that's a good thing for me), but the coco caprylate is a great detangling agent.

How it works

I use it as a cowash between regular shampoos. It is cleansing enough to get rid of 3 to 4 days of piling up products. In cas of heavy conditioning treatment or excessive buid up, it will probably not be enough.

It has a good slip, despite all the reviews I read saying the contrary. I don't need to let it sit too long (I always let my conditioner sit for a couple of minutes before I detangle and rince)

It is moisturizing, thanks to aloe vera and glycerin, but it is light weight. I would recommand it for fine strands which are easily weighed down.

This is an excellent product, totally organic and really efficient. Let me know if you decide to give it a try!

Hi everyone,

First of all, my dear readers, english is not my first language. As stated in the name of my blog, I come from France, where I was born and raised. Do not hesitate to correct me, I decided to write in english to get better at it too.

I recently moved to New Jersey, USA. Since then, I tried many curly hair products, some that I liked, some that I hated. I will talk about it soon.

My hair journey so far...

I remember hating my curly hair at a very young age. I am mixed, french and french caribean. I grew up in an area in France with no other mixed or black people, and very few people with curly hair.

I began to relax and straighten at the age of 15. Ten years later, after a major catastrophe with overprocessed hair, I decided to cut it very short. I have been "natural" since, but I kept using chemical dye and flat iron from time to time.

In 2014 I experienced severe heat damage and decided to give my hair a fresh start... again.

I am now heat free, chemical free, very picky with my hair products, and my hair looks healthier than ever, and... it grows faster than ever. You can see it by yourself, only 4 months passed between these two pictures.

Will you follow me in my hair journey? Pleeaaaaaase, say yes!