Make it Better: Dry Shampoo DIY

DIY Dry shampoo ingredients

After writing this post, I decided to dip my toes into homemade beauty products. I'm not crazy about spending my time on making beauty products at home, but since I love dry shampoo and spend money on it regularly, I thought it would be worth at least giving homemade dry shampoo a try.

I tried out a few versions found around the web, and while I have found store bought dry shampoos to be most cost effective in powder form, I found that I prefer the wet version of the homemade dry shampoo. (I'm not sure just how "dry" one can call it, though!)

Here are the pros and cons I experienced while trying out my dry shampoo at home, along with the recipe I ended up using, which is sort of a mash-up of several versions I tried, and a couple tips I learned along the way...

Recipe
-Cornstarch
-Water
-Witch hazel, or rubbing alcohol, or isopropyl alcohol.
-Spray bottle
-Perfume or essential oil (optional)

Add the first three ingredients in equal parts into a spray bottle. Add a spritz of the perfume or drop of the essential oil, if desired. (Only a tiny bit is necessary to smell it later.) Spray into hair at roots, and blow-dry.

Pros:
-Well, obviously, it's free. Or close to free.
-It smells really good, because one can add any scent she likes.
-Added volume. I have fine, straight, can-be-limp hair, and cornstarch is a thickener in food, so I should not have been so surprised to see that it also added a little fullness to my hair.
-Quick to make. It takes no time at all to combine the ingredients.
-Quick to use. Shaking the bottle and spraying it in takes as little time as a spray version of dry shampoo.
-Fixing bad hair. If I woke up with a section of hair sticking out, the spray fixed it easily.

Cons:
-Until I got the hang of it, it was a little messy, leaving a residue of cornstarch on my bathroom tiles.
-It does not work as well if allowed to air-dry as it does when it is blow-dried.
-Being a liquid, it won't travel as well as my powder dry shampoo.
-It works well for hours, but not as many hours as store-bought dry shampoos. With a blow-dryer, it sets well enough to last about 9 hours, and when air dried, it lasts about 6 hours for me. Store-bought ones usually last over 18 hours for me.

Conclusion:
All in all, I'm going to keep using it because the cost is so much less than a bottle of store-bought dry shampoo, but I will still keep a bottle of Oscar Blandi Pronto Dry Shampoo in my bathroom for days when I want to have that option.

Too small.

Note: Don't try to be cheap like I was and buy the tiny spray bottle. If the tube is not wide enough, the cornstarch will get stuck in the bottom rendering the tube, and therefore the spray bottle, useless. A regular size spray bottle is the perfect size.