Colin's Beauty Pages

John Masters Organic Zinc Shampoo

John Masters Organic Shampoo scored a very impressive 5 stars in the Observer this weekend. Despite the high rating the actual text was a bit terse. It is apparently the “Celebs’ favourite “. Well if people are famous then they are obviously better than us so we ought to take their choice of shampoo seriously. I would be interested to know where the Observer gets its list of celebrities’ favourite beauty products from though. It also describes it as “Thick, almost lather-free, fab smell and even better results.”

That is virtually the whole review. But despite the lack of information in the Observer I was interested so I had a look on the John Masters website and found a bit more about it. I think it is good that some companies are prepared to put the ingredient lists for their products on the web. It shows that they are happy to talk about what is actually in their product. The list is quite long but as cosmetic scientist it didn’t take long to work out what made the formulation tick.

Cleansing Agents

The first two ingredients are water and aloe vera. As the list should be in order of concentration these two materials make up the bulk of the formulation. Aloe vera is obtainable as a juice, which is in fact the sap of the plant, so it is possible that there is a lot of aloe vera sap in this shampoo. It is more likely though that they buy it as a dried powder and make it up with water. This is a crafty way companies can make a claim to be “90%” organic or some such. It is much the same as saying that if you put powdered milk into your tea, then it is 90% milk. It is literally true, but a bit misleading nonetheless. I have seen this done by a great many companies so John Masters are really only following a trend here.

We then come onto the actual cleansing ingredients. These are the workhorses of the formulation, and it is these materials that will determine how well or badly the fomulation is going to perform. The materials used are abassuamidopropyl betaine (organic babassu palm fruit derived), decyl glucoside and disodium cocoamphodiacetate. The first material I had to do some research on. A very typical cleansing agent is cocamidopropyl betaine. This is a derivative of palm oil modified to be a foam booster and you will quite likely find it in some of the products in your bathroom. Abassuamidopropyl betaine seems to be chemically very similar, and I mean here VERY similar, but instead of using palm oil as the starting point a very similar plant from South America is used. It is probably good for the planet to use lots of different crop plants instead of only one or two, so this is a welcome contribution to biodiversity but I doubt it makes any difference to the performance of the product. Decyl glucoside is a sugar derived material which has been an up and coming product in shampoos for a some years now. I have found that it gives excellent results and is also sustainable and biodegradable. The John Masters website states that it is Ecocert approved for eco-clean production. I am not sure exactly what is meant by that but Ecocert are an organisation devoted to ensuring companies meet green production standards. After these two very worthy choices the third material is a more standard material. Disodium cocoamphodiacetate is a fairly standard palm oil derived detergent that you see in lots of hair care products. It works well enough but it isn’t organic and seems a bit of a let down after the first two. (If the person who formulated it is reading this, did you try simply dropping the disodium cocoamphodiacetate? I wouldn’t mind betting the formulation would have worked just as well without it.)

Antidandruff

Next we have a couple of zinc salts, zinc pyrithione and zinc gluconate. The product is claimed to help with itchy scalps and to alleviate psoriasis and eczema. Zinc pyrithione is the active ingredient in Head and Shoulders shampoo. Nobody is really sure how it works in detail, but it is pretty clear that it does work. It is also pretty clear that this is in no way organic or natural.

Tip Ins

Next we have list of herbal ingredients. I am pretty sure that these are not added to the shampoo as leaves or flowers. They will be bought in as infusions from another company. This will require the infusion to be preserved. This in turn gives the herbal extract a nice long shelf life. So for instance the sage quoted in the name of the product will have been grown on a farm somewhere. We know that this would have been an organic farm because the certification body is quoted. But having been grown organically it is then infused in water, probably with glycerine to help the extraction process, filtered and preservatives added. I think that the sodium benzoate and potassium sorbate listed on the ingredient listing come from the herbal infusion. The zinc pyrithione is a good enough antibacterial on its own to preserve the product. The sage extract would proabably be sold to the manufacturer by a company that specialises in plant extracts and probably has a catalogue of hundreds to chose from. The slow moving lines might be in stock for years before they get used. There is nothing illegal or even particularly dishonest about any of this. The text on the John Masters bottle is literally true. There is organic sage in this product as stated. I just wonder if members of the public, or even celebrities, who buy these products realise that this is what is meant by ‘contains organic sage’. There is no doubt what people in the industry think. These raw materials are referred to as ‘tip ins’. I.e., you tip them in at a low level just so you can say they are in there.

Vitamins? I don’t think so

One last ingredient to comment on is panthenol. This is described in brackets after the name as Vitamin B, which is not quite true as strictly speaking it is a pro-vitamin. It is the building block that the body uses to make its own vitamin B5. But it is a good conditioning agent in its own right so its chemical relationship to a vitamin is not really relevant. Used at the right level panthenol will leave a film on the hair that gives it a pleasant feel and stops it flying away.

Overall Conclusion

I haven’t tried this product but I can well believe that it is a good shampoo that will stop your scalp itching and will help with psoriasis and eczema. I am also impressed that they seem to have made some real attempt at producing a natural and organic product. However, I don’t think that they have gone as far as they could have done and are obviously still relying on conventional ingredients to a very large extent. It looks a lot more like a formulation that has been tarted up to make it natural rather than one that has been conceived as natural to begin with.

Discuss it on the beauty forum.