Lush Daddy-O shampoo

Since I tried a Lush shampoo bar, I thought I’d also try one of their regular shampoos. The lady in the store recommended Daddy-O. Formulated especially for blonde hair, this shampoo promises to remove the yellow undertones, erase the grey-ish hues and transform natural blonde hair back to a shiny and voluminous, blonde bombshell look. Or as Lush puts it: a purple shampoo to stop blondes going brassy. Curious to see if it does?

Lush Daddy-O is a shampoo suitable for vegans, contains violet leaf for a great smell and fairtrade ingredients for shiny hair. These are the ingredients:

Fresh Organic Lemon and Toothed Wrack Seaweed Infusion, Sodium Alkyl Sulfate, Sodium Laureth Sulfate, Fresh Sea Water, Perfume, Cocamide MEA, Propylene Glycol, Glycol Cetearate, Fresh Organic Lime Juice, Extra Virgin Coconut Oil, Violet Leaf Absolute, Rose Absolute, Bergamot Oil, Cananga Oil, *Limonene, *Linalool, *Citronellol, Coumarin, Isoeugenol, Methyl Lonone, Benzyl Alcohol, Methylparaben, Propylparaben, Colour 42090, Colour 17200

This shampoo does contain SLS, so if that is something you don’t want to use in your shampoo, then you should skip this one.

The Lush website tells the story of how one of their staff members, a certain Mark, had started to go grey and wanted to keep his newly acquired white hair do white instead of yellow. Since white and blonde hair are similar in structure, they formulated this shampoo in such a way to make it work for both: coconut and seaweed for conditioning, lemon & lime to brighten up the color, and some essential oils to create a nice smell.

Now that’s what Lush has to say, but what I do I think? The products smells fresh and a bit floral, but also a tad powdery. It’s a nice soft smell I’d say that is not too overpowering. It cleans my hair well enough, but I didn’t experience it to brighten my hair or battle some of the brassiness. In fact, in January I got my hair highlighted, something I do every once in a while, to battle the dull and grey-ish hue that comes with getting ‘roots’ from what I like to call ‘my winter hair’.

My hair changes color every 6 months: in summer, sunlight will highlight it naturally, but in winter my lengths always end up a lot brighter than the top and after a few months of the dreaded winter darkness I am left with ‘roots’ and people asking me whether I got my hair colored. I used John Frieda’s Go Blonder (review here) and that helped me to make my hair look even again, but since I had run out of that and was in Lush anyway, I picked this up and hoped for similar results. Unfortunately for me, that did not happen.

To me this is just like every other shampoo, that is, as to how it works. The way it looks and feels, however, is something quite different…

It’s BRIGHT purple. When I bought it, I thought that might just be the bottle, but no, the purple color in the bottle, is the actual product! The foam becomes a light purple and this shampoo provides you with lots of bubbles. I found myself having to rinse every nook and cranny of my shower as it would leave a purple hue if I spilled it anywhere.

As I already mentioned, this shampoo smells very nice. I don’t really notice it lingering in my hair that much, but it cleans my hair and it doesn’t make it extra greasy or anything like that. It doesn’t lighten up my hair the way I had hoped it would, but I think my ‘roots’ may have already been too bad by the time I started using this. It will be interesting to see what happens when I start using this during summer and continue to use it after. Maybe it can prevent my hair from getting roots to begin with, but I still have to try it.

Conclusion: good, great smelling shampoo, but doesn’t give you a huge change in your blonde hair.

What shampoo do you use to keep your hair from going brassy?