I’ve Stopped Using Conditioner – Here’s Why

There are certain elements of a beauty routine that are instilled in us before we even have an awareness of what beauty really is.

We know to clean our teeth, brush our hair, wash our body. We’re told to cleanse, tone, moisturise. To shampoo, to condition. We are what we repeatedly do, and it takes more than a fleeting beauty trend to convince someone to break a lifelong habit.

Alas, I have stopped using conditioner.

Despite what had gone beyond a routine and entered the territory of a dependance, cult US haircare brand Aquis has convinced me that what I believed to be essential may well have been doing more harm to my hair than good.

How? Hair is at its weakest, and most susceptible to damage, when it’s wet. This is because Keratin, the protein hair is made of, stretches and swells as it absorbs water and becomes at risk of damage. Our hair has a natural protective barrier that works to minimise that damage, however a traditional haircare routine disrupts that barrier. Less water and a faster dry time means stronger hair.

It’s this philosophy that the Aquis brand is built upon and it’s the reason why their cult towels and turbans came to be. These towels, which I have used exclusively on my hair for upwards of 9 months, are designed to dry the hair faster, meaning less time spent with wet hair and less time spent exposing the hair to heat damage. My initial qualm with the towels was “How can one specific towel dry my hair faster than, say, my regular bath towel?” and while I’m still not sure of the how, the proof is in the pudding and said pudding is enough for me.

Given that the brand has a history of surprising me (see the above towel conundrum), I should never have been wary of the brand’s newest haircare system- Aquis Prime. This 4 step setup requires you to:
1. Mist the hair with Step 1, the Water Defence Pre Wash (aptly titled given what I now know about water and the hair)
2. Shampoo using Step 2, the Rebalancing Hair Wash, but wait until the very end of the shower to wet the hair, lather and rinse (again, the goal being to minimise the amount of time spent with wet hair)
3. Wrap your damp hair in Step 3, the Rapid Dry Hair Turban (although, for transparency, I rotate this with my much-loved Aquis Waffle Luxe Long Hair Towel depending on what is in the washing machine/basket)
4. Mist the hair with Step 4, the Restorative Leave-In Conditioner, then comb through.

At first, I thought I had misread- there was no conditioner. A leave-in, sure, but leave-in conditioners are nary marketed as a replacement for conditioning altogether. For context, my hair is thick. The kind of thick that when I get to the hairdressers, sit in the chair and take my hair out of its messy pony, I never fail to elicit a response to the tune of “you have a LOT of hair.” That in mind, the thought of attempting to work a comb through un-conditioned hair was enough to make my skin crawl.

But I did it. And have continued to do so for upwards of a month.

Another Aquis teaching is that heavy doesn’t mean hydrated- a trap I had fallen for. I was of the belief that weighty, thoroughly conditioned hair was at its healthiest, however hydration doesn’t necessarily mean layers of thick, heavy products. As I’ve since learnt, your conditioner really should be almost undetectable, working to restore the hair to its natural, protective state and without weighing it down. Since cutting traditional conditioner from my routine, I’ve experienced absolutely none of the tangles, breakage and brittleness I had anticipated.

So- does the system work? For my hair, most certainly. My hair genuinely feels stronger (I found that my hair was already quite strong, but given that I have quite a lot of it I often “malted” which is something that I haven’t noticed since taking up the Prime routine), has far more volume (as it’s no longer being weighed down by conditioner), and the system has cut the amount of time I spend with wet, damage-prone hair down by almost half.

Indeed we are what we repeatedly do, and I have a brand new hair habit.