If you’re pregnant, you can expect to lose some of your hair during and after pregnancy. Search your family tree. If either of your parents or your grandparents had significant hair loss by middle age, keep your fingers crossed. You may have inherited the baldness gene. Are you a female Baby Boomer? Congratulations – you’re menopausal or perimenopausal and so is your hair. If you work in certain occupations, engage in water sports that involve swimming pools and seawater, or live with certain diseases like lupus and diabetes, expect hair issues. The brutal facts are that heredity, lifestyle and life’s events can cause thinning hair, excessive hair loss or baldness.

It’s hard to escape all of the potential factors that could contribute to your hair loss. Meanwhile, back at the fort. The best defense is a good offense. You can help your hair stay healthy longer by adopting a kinder, gentler approach to hair grooming. At least you won’t unwittingly contribute to the factors that could rob your of your hair.

Your hair does NOT need many of the ingredients that you find on the label of your shampoo and conditioner. Many of the indecipherable ingredients have no real purpose in hair care; most are preservatives, binders, waxes or coloring agents. They give you a temporary hair fix. Unfortunately, you will soon find that you need another fix soon after, if you are to keep your bad hair days to a minimum. Even a few organic and natural shampoos use some suspect ingredients.

Grab a shampoo bottle; any bottle from a major cosmetics manufacturer will do. Take out your reading glasses and fire up your browser. Get ready for some interesting reading. In addition to the usual suspects mentioned here previously (DEA, Phalates, Parabens, Propylene and Polyethylene Glycol, Sodium Lauryl and Sodium Laureth Sulfate), some other common ingredients that you DON’T need for healthy hair are:

1.    Fragrance
2.    Imidazolidinyl Urea
3.    DMDM Hydantoin
4.    Isopropyl Alcohol
5.    Mineral Oil and Petrolatum

These ingredients can lead to skin irritation and dryness, hormone disruptions, cancer and worse. A good rule of thumb for hair care ingredients is if you can’t eat it, you shouldn’t be putting it on your skin and hair!

Visit the Skin Deep website to find shampoos and conditioners with the fewest unnecessary chemicals. Give the hair you’ve got a better chance of staying on your head.

Tags: baldness, binders, conditioner, DMDM Hydantoin, Fragrance, grooming, hair loss, Imidazolidinyl Urea, ingredients, irritation, Isopropyl Alcohol, menopausal, Mineral Oil, natural, organic, Petrolatum, pregnancy, preservatives, shampoo, thinning hair, waxes, womens hair loss

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 8th, 2009 at 4:00 pm and is filed under Natural Hair Growth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.