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The Secrets to a Healthy Scalp!

The Secrets to a Healthy Scalp!

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Taking care of your hair is important if we want it to grow healthy and beautiful. But we mustn’t forget about the scalp! Find out how to best take care of it.

We all know the benefits of regular exfoliation of the face and body: it makes the skin glowy and smooth, it is a good way to encourage cell renewal, and it also helps to achieve an even and long-lasting tan. In short, removing the top layer of dead skin cells from our skin has numerous advantages. In recent years this habit has also been applied more widely to the scalp: in fact, regular gentle exfoliation of the scalp is a great habit if done correctly and with the right product.

 

Healthy hair in healthy scalp

The ongoing quest for strong, healthy hair necessarily starts with a healthy, clean and undamaged scalp. However, cleansing with a shampoo is often not enough, and an extra step may be requested. This is where scalp exfoliation comes in, which can be a real “lifesaver” in our routine, the solution we needed without knowing it! By gently massaging the scalp with the right product, we can help to cleanse the skin more thoroughly, eliminating any products build up.

 

Build up: what it is and how to avoid it

Sometimes we wash our hair every day, but regardless we still feel it is heavy to the touch, not perfectly clean. Sound familiar? The cause could be the product build-up: a progressive layering of styling products, silicones, moisturizers and sebum which, if not carefully removed, can lead to hair becoming dull and heavy.

Insight has created a special product for this purpose, which gently but effectively exfoliates the delicate skin of the scalp, leaving it free from impurities and ready for the next steps. The Rebalancing Scalp Exfoliating Cream, thanks to the organic lavender and sage extracts, and tea tree oil, with anti-bacterial properties, carries out an exfoliating and simultaneously purifying action: while eliminating dead cells and accumulations of natural oils from the skin, it helps to combat excess sebum and the formation of dandruff, thanks to the scrubbing particles of Andiroba which ensure a gentle but effective scrub on the scalp. In addition, this formula contains no animal derivatives, as it’s Vegan OK certified. 

Using the exfoliating cream is very simple. Start by taking a small amount of product and applying it to dry scalp. Using your fingertips, massage gently, making sure to cover the entire head, and adding more product as necessary. Once the massage is complete, rinse thoroughly. That’s it! After this gentle exfoliation we can proceed with the hair routine we desire: an anti-dandruff, anti-loss, sebum-regulating treatment, etc. Whichever choice we make, we can be sure that our treatment will be more effective, because we are applying it to perfectly clean skin, free of impurities. Ideally, the skin should be exfoliated regularly to keep the formation of sebum under control.

Discover the complete INSIGHT Rebalancing line, formulated to take care of the skin’s wellbeing, the first step towards beautiful, healthy hair. 

 

 

 

 

 
Shampoo, the story of a modern tradition

Shampoo, the story of a modern tradition

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Let’s discover the history of Shampoo, from 18th century India to modern Europe: how the essential product we know today was born.

Would you ever have thought that Shampoo, a product so essential to our personal hygiene that we use almost every day, was a rather recent invention?

That’s right: shampoo as we know it was invented in the early decades of the 20th century. Its story begins in India, and through the English colonists it arrived in Europe. Let’s discover how!

 

Shampoo means massage

The custom of shampoo, or champo, comes from India, and was imported to England in the second half of the 1700s. The word champo in Hindi means “to apply pressure, to massage” and recalls the massage applied during the cleansing of the hair. Around those years Sheik al-Din Mohammad exported this custom in Europe, opening the first center for hygiene and therapeutic massage in Brighton. Among the various services offered, in this center it was also possible to book a champo, that is a cleansing and massage of the skin and hair.

 

Shampoo in the past

In the past there have been many ingredients and rituals for washing skin and hair, let’s see some of them.

In ancient Egypt a mixture of vinegar and water was used to rub the scalp and lengths. Romans, instead, used a sort of soap made of ashes mixed with lard and other fatty substances. In this case, the cleansing was more for the slightly abrasive and absorbent action of the ash, while the oils dissolved the excess sebum on the skin.

During the Middle Ages shampoo was made by mixing alcohol (often brandy) with eggs or even sulfur. Women used to wear their hair always styled away from the face, in braids and gathered hairstyles, and cover themselves with a veil. These hairstyles made the hair much less dirty.

 

The invention of the modern shampoo

Shampoo as we know it, a detergent containing surfactants that produce foam and cleanse the skin, is a recent invention. The first shampoos date back to the late 1800s, and consisted of powders to be dissolved in water, invented by chemist Hans Schwartzkopf. Until then, shampoo was made by boiling together soap flakes, with the addition of scented oils. These soaps had a pH level not suitable for cleansing hair, therefore it is likely that the frizzy hair effect was much more common at that time than today. To see the very first shampoo similar to ours today, and specifically formulated for washing the head, we will have to wait until the 1930s, when the first shampoo in liquid form and composed of synthetic ingredients was introduced to the market.

 

For many years that was the only option on the market. Up until today, when the choice is endless and there are shampoos for every need. Have you tried INSIGHT shampoos? Delicate and effective, discover them all and find the one that’s right for you.

 

 

 

 

 

Do you know your hair?

Do you know your hair?

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 Let’s discover together the structure of the hair and its composition, we will see how under the microscope they are very different than with the naked eye.

Whether long or short, we have always attached enormous importance to our hair, considering it an integral part of our style and our concept of beauty. Over the centuries, fashions and tastes have evolved, and colors and trendy hairstyles have changed from time to time, but hair has always remained at the center of our attention. There are many reasons why hair represents a feature of great importance in any culture and are to be found in psychology and anthropology. Today we are not going to fathom the mystery of this fascination of ours, but another “mystery”, so to speak, which can be unraveled by science: what is hair really made of?

Let’s find out!

Let’s start by saying that hair is an inert material, this means that it is a non-living skin annex, therefore unable to repair itself and not equipped with its own vital functions. The root of the hair is the living part, it is there that all the functions that lead to the formation of the hair take place, but the shaft is not.

 

How is the hair made?

The hair structure is concentric: let’s imagine it as a tiny tree trunk. By cutting it lengthwise, we will discover three sections one inside the other. We’ll see what they are shortly.

We can divide it by its length into two parts, the root and the stem . The root is the active part of the hair, the one we do not see because it is inserted into the hair follicle on the skin. The terminal part of the root is called the bulb. 

The visible part of the hair, the one we can touch and comb, is called the shaft, or even the stem. The structure of the stem seen under a microscope is composed of three concentric layers:

  • an external part called the cuticle, made up of keratin flakes superimposed in layers
  • the area under the cuticle is called the cortex or cortical area, and is the one that gives the hair its color, which will be more or less dark depending on how much melanin is contained within it
  • the innermost area, called medulla, whose function is still unclear and is not even present in all hair. 

 

Keratin, the substance of the hair

The hair is composed almost entirely of keratin. It is a high molecular weight protein, which makes it very resistant. Contrary to popular belief, thin hair has thicker outer cuticles than thicker hair. What makes them thinner is the fact that they have a finer bark. The cortex is the most important part of the shaft, it is composed of fusiform cells, which give the hair an elongated shape, rich in keratin and melanin grains, which is the pigment on which the hair color depends. To hold everything together, there is a matrix made up of lipids and proteins.

Melanin, which, as we have said, attributes color to the hair, is produced by melanocytes found inside the hair root, and can be of three types: eumelanin, which produces a brown/black color, pheomelanin, which produces a yellow/red color, trichosiderin, typical of red hair. Their combination gives rise from time to time to infinite shades of color.

What about white hair? It is due to the arrest of the functioning of the melanocytes inside the bulb, which thus stop producing pigment and the bark of the hair remains colorless

 

How does hair grow?

Hair doesn’t grow continuously, as you might think, but it goes on a cycle. The period of growth, called anagen, is followed by a slowing down period, catagen, which is then followed by the phase of death and fall of the hair, called telogen. After the telogen, a new hair begins to form inside the bulb. Each hair on our head is in a different phase of its life cycle than the neighboring hair: if this were not the case we would periodically see the appearance of empty patches or the simultaneous fall and regrowth of all hair.

 

Finally, a few numbers

A single hair is made up of 100,000 / 150,000 hairs on average. We physiologically lose 50 to 100 hairs every day.

On average the hair growth rate is about 18cm per year, so if you are fondling the idea of ​​cutting the much-desired bangs, or giving in to a nice pixie cut, you can now calculate the time it takes for your hair to return exactly to its current length. 

 

Great Hair Results with Natural products

Healthy hair using Natural products for hair are kind of like facials for your hair. Sure, our regular hair care products are helping to keep our hair cleansed, protected and in good health just like our skincare products, but both hair and skin can do with a replenishing boost at regular intervals. Aside from what we do to our hair in terms of chemical processing and heated styling, other factors such as environmental conditions, diet, health, stress and hydration all take a toll on the health of our hair. When you decide it is time to indulge your hair in a luxurious treatment, you will find many beautiful treatment products available at LF Hair & Beauty to give your hair the pampering it needs and deserves!