Finding the right shampoo for my kids

Being the compulsive 'ingredient list' reader that I am, it took me a week to find a suitable and reasonably priced baby shampoo for my kids. It should not be that difficult, should it? Shampoos should fundamentally be just gentle soaps with conditioners. Living in the city (and not a coal mine or a grease factory) there is just sand and sweat that we need to get rid of from our hair.

Since my children play in the sand every single day, No Poo, just warm water in the hair is not for us. 

Next best option would be to go all natural - which costs an arm, a leg and then some. I don't get it. Why should something which should be a gentle soap with more coconut oil or some other oil, be THAT expensive because it is all natural? why? why? why? I refuse to pay for branding or support the 'will pay anything for the good stuff' movement.

After a fruitless search for a reasonably priced natural/organic shampoo, I started researching recipes for shampoos. What the heck, I will just make it myself...only to realise that Lye is not available in Singapore, I am not a chemist and it will take some iterations to get it right. My kids had gone 'No Poo' for a week at this point. 

I decided buy myself some time and went to look for the most benign mainstream product available and started reading up on what is in the shampoos and what does it do?

Water - 70 to 80% of all shampoos is water...dear old H₂O. No wonder they don't even make bar shampoos anymore! We will get to that another time.

The second most abundant ingredient is SLS or sodium lauryl sulfate or one of its ammonium salts. Nothing wrong with that. I checked the MSDS and all clear.....except for the fact that it is a harsh, harsh detergent. So harsh that it is used to scrub garage floors...but why is it in our shampoo? Because it is cheap.

Then there came Isopropyl alcohol, which is meant to cut the oil....the problem it works too well. It strips hair off its natural oils, which in turn causes your body to produce even more to compensate for that. The hair care/cosmetics industry does not cater to developed world urban population? huh?

Parabens - Parabens are preservatives. There is research that shows that at the concentrations in which they are used in the cosmetics, they are not carcinogenic or estrogen producing or endocrine disrupting...but then they are everywhere and all uses add up and a lifetime adds up and young children's skin adds up. I remain sceptical.

Next up...Butylene Glycol - a known skin irritant for a preservative. After cleaning my children's hair with a detergent, alcohol and a known skin irritant, I will need to condition it with silicones?

Then there were a host of fragrances and oils and thickeners and more…

I have to say, the fact that products containing all these unnecessary chemicals (derived from natural sources or made synthetically) are mainstream and that we have accepted this quality as the standard of our living is very disturbing. In the world that we live in, we expect our cosmetics to last for a 100 years without going bad and we put them in bottles that will last a 1000 years without going bad. The alternatives are alternatives and are priced as premium products should not be acceptable. It does not make sense.

We must demand better for ourselves and our families. 

I continue my research on making shampoo at home…