By Chrissy Iley
For a start anything with the words carb and cocktail draws me in. Love carbs, love cocktails. To me those words together are synonymous with good times and more good times. Little did I know how good a time the Color Wow Carb Cocktail would be for my hair.
As the name suggests, it sends hair into a euphoric and pumped up state. The hair literally gets fatter. I use it every time I wash my hair but particularly after I’ve had colour. Colour processing makes the hair porous and causes loss of natural protein mass meaning it looks wizened and thin without muscle.
When I have coloured my hair – and I do have the most difficult hair – but I’m sure I’m not alone in this – I have a choice of it going frizzy and static or limp and static.
If you’ve got weak hair it takes weeks for it to recover from colour and by that time you need to have it done again. Plus I’ve been colouring my hair since I was fifteen – a very long time ago. I coloured it when I didn’t need to colour it. Now I have to colour it but it’s always been a conundrum. Colour versus condition and by choosing colour it meant that I had lifeless hair stuck to my face until I was able to grease it up again.
The Color Wow Carb Cocktail is an ingenious invention. Its leave in “bionic tonic” bonds to the hairs surface. Whatever is in it, which I believe is a blend of corn starch, cellulose and oat bran, thickens the hair strand by strand and expands the hair mass. But it’s a cocktail so it’s not just about the starch. Quinoa and keratin protein fortify hair, making it smooth with a glossy surface. Some people have described it as ironing something with a starch spray to make limp fabrics appear with substance and less flimsy. To me it’s more than that. It’s hair with stamina, without stiffness. It’s full bodied, full moving hair without stickiness. It’s the kind of hair that people who know you will say, ‘have you had extensions?’ No – it’s full fat hair.
In the history of hair products there have been some life changing inventions. For instance in the 80’s the styling product itself was invented by John Frieda and it was called Frizz Ease because millions of women wanted their hair to have volume not frizz. In the 90’s it was Lee Stafford’s dry shampoo which went hand in glove with hair straighteners that could travel the world.
Earlier on I thought it was the colour wow root powder which had the edge so you could touch up colour on your roots between salon visits. I was wrong.
The carb cocktail is to hair what bread is to butter, what tequila is to pineapple. It’s a revolution but once you’ve enjoyed it, it will become an everyday miracle, an essential (£22.00)
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