When you’re in the grocery or drug store, have you ever thought to stop and compare the ingredients of the shampoo, toothpaste, soap, and lotions you use? Most of us haven’t, because compared to food, there aren’t groups of beauty and personal care products that are tagged as "bad", whereas with food, we’ve been taught about junk food and how unhealthy it is since we were little. With food, we are somewhat given a choice. We are aware that there is bad food and good food, and the autonomy to choose is ours for the taking.

However, with personal care and beauty products, it seems like all the options are “good”, so it’s easy to just choose the shampoo with the prettiest bottle or the most fragrant tub of lotion. More often than not, all the goodness that you think you’re paying for goes to these attention-grabbing details, leaving you with just a pretty bottle and less effective products, or worse, products that can cause more harm than good.

If you ever decide to read and compare the ingredients of store-bought shampoos, you’ll find that there are some 15 common components. Most of these you’ll also find on the products in the household cleaning supplies aisle, maybe even the hardware. Among these ingredients are ammonium lauryl sulfate (SLES), parabens, and sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS), which are the most common. Parabens are used to prolong the shelf life of products and have been linked to the increased growth of breast cancer cells. Sodium Lauryl Sulfate, or SLS, can compromise follicles when left on the scalp. SLS can potentially cause irritation to your eyes, skin, mouth, and lungs; it can even clog pores and cause acne. SLES is basically what cleans our scalp. It rinses off the oils and dirt from our hair, but because it’s very strong, it carries the scalp’s natural oils and healthful components with it.

More than being potentially toxic to human health, common shampoo ingredients are also detrimental to the environment. Sulfates like SLS and SLES are non-biodegradable. Sewer systems cannot clean and process these detergents, so they enter our seas and oceans, where marine life can be disrupted. In the long run, the contamination of our waterways will affect both marine and human lives.

Apart from harmful ingredients, genetics and hormones also play a huge role in hair health. Dihydrotestosterone (DHT) is a sex hormone present in both men and women that determines the "male" characteristics in our bodies. Free-flowing DHT in our bloodstream links to the receptors in hair follicles and shrinks them, rendering the follicles less capable of sustaining a healthy head of hair. DHT shrinks hair follicles as well as shortens the hair's growth cycle. This causes hair to grow out thinner and more brittle and to fall out faster. DHT can also make it take longer for your follicles to grow new hair once the old ones fall out. The correct manipulation of DHT can delay and stop male-pattern balding.

To sum it up, we must stop DHT from linking to the receptors that shrink hair follicles. Luckily, Koso Med has formulated a shampoo that does just that without the harmful ingredients that add to the biological causes of hair loss. Koso Med’s Vegan Therapeutic Shampoo boasts an ingredient list of oils, juices, and extracts derived from organic herbs and plants. These healthful ingredients are fermented, ensuring the natural extraction of the essential nutrients and proteins that go straight to your scalp and hair.

The fermentation process eliminates the need for preservatives like parabens and excludes the use of artificial ingredients and heat, which kill a lot of the essential nutrients we want for our hair.