NEW ARTICLE! Clean 7’s Take on Weaving Ayurveda Into Your Detox
NEW ARTICLE! Clean 7’s Take on Weaving Ayurveda Into Your Detox

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Hair

CONSIDER SAFER Options to Color Your Hair

Consider Safer Options to Color Your Hair
@nycbambi

It seems like an odd coincidence that coloring your hair should be called “dying.” Certainly death of a kind is occurring whenever we saturate our scalp (the part of our bodies closest to our control center, to boot) with toxic chemicals once every 6 weeks or so.

While there isn’t yet a perfectly natural, completely clean option for hair dye unless you’re going the more limited henna route (which is actually really great, though the colors you can choose from are few and restricted to darker shades), there are a few brands out there that offer formulations that exclude some of the major toxic culprits.

According to Poison.org, there are up to 25 different ingredients in hair dyes that can cause harmful effects. While these ingredients can irritate the skin, causing irritation, redness, sores, itching, and burning, consider that everything we put on the skin seeps into our bodies and is actively in our bloodstream and organs, in a very short amount of time.

One of the harshest chemical irritants is the primary intermediate, Paraphenylenediamine, aka PPD. Contact with skin can cause irritation including redness, sores, itching, and burning, and it’s been shown to be present in breast milk and urine after-the-fact.

And let’s face it—our hair is a living, growing thing (about 1/8th of an inch per week!), so dying our hair isn’t a one time occurrence. Which means that the issue boils down to accumulated toxic exposure. Most hair dyes, on top of containing PPD, also contain quaternium-15, which releases formaldehyde which can be carcinogenic, and is yes, used to embalm diseased bodies.

Formaldehyde is the #1 toxic ingredient removed from modern, cleaner nail polishes and with good reason. Q-15 can also release alkylphenol ethoxylates (APEs), which are hormone disruptors and wreak havoc on every system of the body.

We’ve mentioned that there are no perfectly clean, green, all-natural and effective hair dyes on the market, but don’t let that scare you into hiding, curled up in a corner pulling at your greys or extended roots! There are some options today that are cleaner, meaning they don’t have PPD, quaternium-15, or formaldehyde—our favorite right now is Madison Reed.

Madison Reed is also paraben free, which is important because parabens are some of the most highly-absorbable toxins via our skin barrier. There is no ammonia, phthalates, gluten, SLS, or titanium dioxide, which has been known to accumulate in the breast tissue as well. While we know we can’t all quit hair color (hello, society?) We can make wiser choices in understanding what toxins are in the products we use, and what other options we have.