Found a new product…Everyday Shea

I’d been meaning to write about this for a while, and today Erin’s post over at The Conscious Shopper inspired me to just sit down and do it…

A couple of weeks ago I was hitting the local Whole Foods trying to find a new shampoo, since my hair had reached the point with my old one that it Just Wasn’t Doing The Trick any more. (That has always happened to me, by the way…there’ll be this product I love, and I’ll use it for a couple of years, and then at some point my hair just goes all Blah and I have to switch to something else for a couple of months.  When I come back to it, it’s usually fine again.)  Part of my goal was to not spend $14 for an 8 oz. bottle of the stuff.

So in the middle of the aisle I see this display with giant bottles of shampoo and conditioner, brand name “Everyday Shea.” I picked one up to check it out: $9.99 for one of those huge pump bottles that’ll last for ages.  I was a little trepidatious, though–$9.99 for a giant 32 oz. bottle of something I buy and wind up hating isn’t a good deal at all, and the waste involved in that would also bug me enough that I’d probably feel like I had to finish the bottle anyway…but enough about my personal neuroses…

I asked one of the salespeople about it, and she said it was literally brand-new yesterday and thus obviously had no reviews or anything from buyers or employees, but that the Everyday Shea lotion they’d carried for a while was awesome.  So I figured…why not?

Review: I like it.  Two weeks and my hair is behaving well; not heavy and greasy, and not dry and flyaway.  This stuff seems to be striking a good balance in terms of how much moisture my hair needs.  I love that it only has bout five ingredients.  Almost better–I looked on the company’s website, and I really like what they’re about–it’s a Togolese community cooperative, and 10% of all proceeds go back into the coop.  Community-owned and run, part of Alaffia Sustainable Skin Care, part of its goal is to use indigenous African resources (in this case, shea butter) to enrich the economic lives of the local people rather than big corporations and such.   (The hair care products are apparently new enough that they haven’t even got them on their website yet…)

This is a company I’d be happy to support, even if the product weren’t as fine as it is, or as affordable as it is…but it’s also a good shampoo for a really good price!  If you see it anywhere, I’d highly recommend checking it out.

(UPDATE: Still like it a couple of weeks later, but I discovered that it moisturizes so well that if I use conditioner, my hair gets all weighed down after a while.  I was using my conditioner anyway, because, well, it’s WINTER and I always need conditioner in the winter.  Once I stopped, this shampoo was able to do the work of both, no froozldy ends or over-staticked flyawayness…I’m liking it better and better. And it still doesn’t get the roots greasy.)