What Causes Hair Build Up?
Hair build up is caused by hair products, your natural body oils, skin cells, hard water deposits, and even pollutants building up on your hair or scalp. At any given time, it’s natural for us to have tiny amounts of hair products, oil, pollutants and/or hard water deposits in our hair, as having 100% clean hair is nearly impossible. However, when we get ‘too much’ hair products, scalp oils, pollutants or mineral deposits in our hair it can start to cause problems with how our hair feels, acts or responds to styling. In severe cases it may even cause our scalp to feel irritated or itchy! So, it’s important to find a haircare routine that keeps build-up at a low level.
Does Hair Gel Cause Build Up?
Any products that you use on your hair or scalp can cause build-up, including shampoo! Yes, even shampoo. The more products you use, the more likely you are to get build-up. However, people often think that if they avoid using products like gel, mousse, curl cream, etc then they won’t get build-up, which is not the case. Everyone gets some amount of build-up, it’s just a matter of how much they get and how strong of a shampoo they need to use to clean their hair.
Not all shampoos are made equally, some are stronger than others, or work to remove certain types of buildup better than other products. You may find that some shampoos are not well-suited to remove build-up from certain products. The curly girl method attempted to simplify this by stating that if you avoid silicone products in your haircare products, then you don’t need to use a sulfate-containing shampoo. While this is commonly believed, it is not backed up with research or science (the curly girl method book sites no sources at all!).
Also, these days, there is a wide range of different strengths of shampoos even when looking at sulfate shampoos or non-sulfate shampoos. Meaning, even if you use all silicone-free products and use a sulfate-containing shampoo, you still may get build-up that needs to be removed with a stronger shampoo periodically.
