Product Review - Salon Grafix Spay Powder Shampoo for Brunette Shades

I thought this stuff was going to change my life. I really did. When you haven’t slept in a week and the paper pile on your desk has somehow erupted into a non-stop lava flow of things to do I guess you vulnerable to the enticements offered by a can of powdered dry shampoo. Cleans and refreshes scalp! Gives roots an extra lift! Extends your blowout for days!

Dry shampoo sounds a little like something you should be using on horses or other barn animals, right? Well, apparently this stuff’s been around for ages (like, the 1970s) and several lines have ‘em – Bumble & Bumble has their Hair Powder ($35.00) and Rene Furterer has Naturia ($21.00). It’s basically powder in aerosol form that you spray on roots to absorb oil. It cuts down on the greasy look of a blowout and extends the amount of time between shampoos.

I’m sure you’re wondering, can this girl be that lazy? Why doesn’t she just drag her lazy ass into the shower and wash that stinky mane? Well, for once thing, curly/wavy head gals like yours truly aren’t supposed to shampoo that often because it actually dries out the hair. And when you are pressed for time, sometimes blowing or flatironing your hair actually saves time over the course of a few days. A twenty-minute blowout on Sunday night means that I don’t have to do anything but run a brush through my hair until at least Wednesday. I’d want for it to last longer but what always kills me is the greasy way my scalp starts to feel and the smell of oily hair.

So when the can of Salon Grafix Dry Shampoo fell into my hot little hand visions of blowout nirvana dangled in front of me. Woo hoo, I thought. I won’t have to bother with my hair for at least five days! Their dry shampoo is a colored powder spray, with colors for blonde, brunette and black hair. I picked up the brunette color at my local Rite Aid for $6.99. “Yes!,” I thought. “I’m so very cleaver with my cheap dry shampoo! This is going to be the shizz!”

Little did I realize how wrong I was. Four hours after spraying the product on my roots, I was in the shower, squirting palmful after palmful of traditional shampoo into my hair and sudsing like a crazy woman to get all of it out.

What I didn’t like about it
First of all, it’s stinky. I started with the bathroom door closed, but after about ten quick bursts I couldn’t stand it anymore and had to run outside to get some air. It smelled exactly like the girl’s junior high bathroom circa 1988, when breaktime meant that you ran to the bathroom to stake your place in front of the mirror so that you could spray the hell out of your bangs with your ever-present can of Aqua Net hair spray along with twenty other girls.

This product is also really messy. After I finished putting it on and waited for two minutes for the powder to settle, I realized that there was soon a fine layer of black powder on my forehead and face … and on everything else in the bathroom. It was all over the sink, on the floor, on the rim of the tub (later, when I was furiously trying to shampoo it all out I realized that somehow a layer also got into the tub). So gross.

It got even more disgusting when I brushed the powder through from the roots to the ends – huge, black flakes of product started falling into the sink.

I pulled my once beautiful blowout into a ponytail and hoped to god that I didn’t sweat for the rest of the day, because the last thing I needed was a trail of black, inky sweat running down the sides of my face.

The rest of the day was spent in misery. The 80s Aqua Net smell didn’t dissipate and once or twice I absent mindedly scratched at my scalp and ended up with black goo underneath my fingernails. Blech.

But then I remembered that I willingly sprayed black powder onto my hair, and that somewhere along the way I should’ve realize that this was probably a BAD IDEA!

What I liked about it
Although there were many things that I didn’t like about this product, I can at least say that it partially did what it said it would do – it cut down the oily look of my roots and gave my flat blowout some lift.

The final word
Ewww. This is going back to Rite Aid ASAP, and I’m not going to buy it again. If you even mildly curious about this product then keep your receipt in case you want to return it. Also use it in a well-ventilated space that you plan on cleaning because you are guaranteed to get crap all over the place.

Well, I was all psyched to go and to the MAC Flashtronic event and when I got there on Friday I found out that they signed me up a day early … the event was actually scheduled for the next day, Saturday. I had a really long week and thus my plans to sleep in Saturday took precedence over limited edition Mineralize Skinfinishes, so no Flashtronic loot for me. I’m probably better off though, because I ended up using the budgeted makeup $ to buy a new hair dryer at Sephora.

I hope you’re having a good hair day and that your week is off to a fantastic start.

Your friendly neighborhood beauty addict,

Karen