Sometimes Black Is the New Purple

Purple shampoo. It’s everywhere.

If you have grey, white or blonde hair, you already know the story. Purple cancels yellow, and the hair looks whiter and brighter for it.

And it works. We’re not going to pretend otherwise.

But have you ever stopped to wonder what actually makes purple shampoo purple?

It isn’t violets. It isn’t lavender. It isn’t some rare botanical picked at dawn on a windswept hillside.

It’s synthetic violet dye.

Read the ingredient lists of many of the leading purple shampoos and the same name keeps turning up: CI 60730, also known as Acid Violet 43, an anthraquinone dye with its roots in the long-established world of coal-tar and petrochemical chemistry.

And that dye isn’t in there to make the bottle look pretty on your shelf. It’s the bit doing the toning.

Why pale hair goes yellow in the first place

White and grey hair has little or none of the melanin that once gave it colour. So discolouration that would disappear without trace in darker hair suddenly has nowhere to hide.

Sebum from the scalp. Pollution and smoke. Styling products. Mineral deposits from the water coming out of your shower. All the ordinary residues of an ordinary week can build up on the hair and cast a dull, yellowish tinge over what should be beautiful silver or white. Sun, heat and oxidation do their bit too.

Which means the hair isn’t necessarily turning yellow from within. Often what you’re looking at is discolouration sitting on, or within, a very pale fibre with no darker pigment to disguise it.

And that’s the gap purple shampoo steps into.

Purple sits directly opposite yellow on the colour wheel. Deposit a little violet onto the hair and it visually cancels the yellow and the brassiness.

Simple. Clever. Effective.

So why don’t we use it?

Because when we sat down and thought it through, we decided we didn’t want to add a synthetic violet colourant to a shampoo bar for the sole purpose of making grey hair look whiter.

So we went back to black instead.

Our Bee Healthy Scalp Scrub Shampoo for Flaky Scalp, Brighter Whites & Greys is built around activated bamboo charcoal, and charcoal works in an entirely different way. It doesn’t deposit violet colour. It doesn’t disguise yellow. Its highly porous surface adsorbs impurities and helps lift away the oils, grime and environmental build-up that can gum up the hair shaft and leave pale hair looking flat and dull.

There are sustainably sourced bamboo granules in there too, gently scrubbing away flakes, along with chunky Tasmanian kelp, apple cider vinegar, calendula, leatherwood honey and beeswax and cacao butter to keep the whole thing kind rather than stripping.

Grey and white hair shows everything. Our approach is to help get the muck off it, rather than put another colour onto it.

And yes, we do appreciate the glorious contradiction of washing white hair with something black. It amuses us every time.

One caveat we’d rather you heard from us than discovered in the shower: because of the charcoal, this particular bar is not suitable for dyed or colour-treated hair. If your silver is chemically maintained, this isn’t your bar.

I’ve been using them for a few years now, and they keep my lovely long white hair from going yellow. My scalp has never been less flaky, either.

~ Clare

The same idea, in conditioner form

For anyone whose hair is coloured or chemically treated, or simply fine and inclined to flatness, there’s a second charcoal in the range doing similar work from the other end of the wash.

Our Voodoo Activated Charcoal Conditioner for Fine or Brassy Hair and Flakey Scalp is the colour of a midnight sky, and the activated bamboo charcoal in it acts as a natural toner for brassiness while lifting away the residue that weighs fine hair down. Unlike the shampoo bar, it is perfectly safe for coloured hair. Leatherwood honey and beeswax, panthenol and Tasmanian nettle and horsetail do the softening and detangling, so nothing feels stripped in the pursuit of brightness.

It’s the same principle, dressed differently. Take away what’s dulling the hair instead of painting over it.

The Professor, naturally, has his own version. Professor Edward J Fuzzworthy’s Activated Charcoal Beer Shampoo puts activated charcoal to work alongside Tasmanian beer, hops, honey and beeswax, for the bearded and the silver-templed among us. Same thinking, considerably more hops.

We’re not here to frighten you

We aren’t saying purple shampoo is dangerous, because it isn’t. Synthetic doesn’t automatically mean bad, any more than natural automatically means good. That’s a lazy line and we’ve never been comfortable with it.

We simply prefer not to reach for a synthetic dye when there’s another way to approach the problem. That’s a choice about how we like to make things, not a warning about anyone else’s.

It’s the same instinct that’s guided us for more than thirty years in our small factory in Glenorchy, making everything in small batches by hand. Buy better, buy less. Use fewer things, and understand what’s in the ones you do use.

Purple shampoo adds colour to counteract yellow.

Ours uses charcoal to help take the grime away.

Sometimes black really is the new purple.