How to Get Rid of Silicone Grease From Hair

When my hair gets frizzy, a good silicone serum is like magic. You simply rub a drop into your hands, iron your hair all the way, and your hair looks like a million dollars. But after that you have to wash your hands, which sometimes seems impossible. Silicone just doesn’t wash out like other hair products.

So, the anti-frizz serum is on the shelf in my bathroom, mostly unused. A few days ago, my four year old child found it.

“What’s in your hair?” I have asked. On his head were wet, shiny curls. “I washed it!” he said. With what? “Hair soap!”

Our hand soap comes in a green container with a pump lid. The anti-frizz serum is also in a green container with a pump lid. Four-year-olds have a vague idea that hand soap is not meant for hair, but they also cannot read words like serum or shampoo.

I asked my Facebook friends what makes hair silicone. Surely someone knows. Apple cider vinegar was the first and second answers, and it appeared several more times throughout the day. I had my doubts, since silicone is not water soluble. Another popular recommendation is a cleansing shampoo, but is there a difference between a cleansing shampoo and a regular shampoo?

Crowdsourcing won’t solve my problem. I needed to use science.

Applicants

I compiled a list of substances believed to remove silicone and sent them to beauty chemist Randy Schueller from the Beauty Brains blog and podcast. He spent decades developing and testing hair products and was happy to talk about silicones. However, he had no good news on my list. “Most of these things will be a waste of time.”

Before going into details, he noted that not all silicones are created equal. My Garnier Fructis Sleek & Shine serum contained cyclopentasiloxane as its first ingredient. According to him, this one actually evaporates into the air. The second ingredient was dimethiconol , which is slightly soluble in water. Since I had not dealt with dimethicone , the least soluble of the group, my chances were pretty good.

Then I remembered why I chose Garnier’s serum. He does wash off my hands with a little effort. I have tried other serums before which were much worse; it is highly likely that they contained dimethicone.

Here’s what Schüller said about my line-up:

• Vinegar , apple cider, or other ingredients: Not useful unless it’s 100% glacial acetic acid. This is something a chemist might encounter in a laboratory, but you won’t find it in the kitchen, and you shouldn’t bring it anywhere to your skin if you do. Vinegar is a hard business.
• Baking soda : Also useless.
• Olive oil, peanut butter, and other fatty cooking substances : unlikely to help. Natural oils do not mix well with silicones.
• Mineral spirits : “This will really work,” he said, but noted that it was not safe to apply to skin . This one is on my list because it is the main ingredient in silicone sealant removers. It would be good for this or for fabrics, he said, just don’t soak your clothes in this flammable liquid and then throw them in a gas dryer.
• Clarifying Shampoo : “It was my top choice,” he said. Brightening shampoos differ from other shampoos in two ways: they do not contain their own silicones; and they have a high concentration of surfactants, ingredients that do the cleaning.
• Dish soap works for the same reason: it is a powerful cleaning agent.

Blow to science, I noticed that by the end of the day, my child’s hair was no longer sticky. This should be the vaporization of the cyclopentasiloxane, as Schüller said. However, I still wanted to test various cleaning products, so I came up with an experiment.

Experiment

I smeared the anti-frizz serum samples on the undyed cotton samples. It was not possible to mold the specimens twice as I knew what technique I was using for each specimen, but I marked them with letters so that I could pass them on to an impartial judge.

I tried vinegar that spilled onto the silicone coated fabric. Since you can make fabrics waterproof by spraying silicone on them , this is not surprising. Then came Pantene Shampoo, a non-luminous type that had dimethicone on the ingredient list. I soaped and rinsed and repeated, and the fabric seemed pretty clean. I also tried the Mitch Heavy Hitter Brightening Shampoo which I found to be working very well.

Then came white spirs and olive oil, and here I ran into an obstacle in the experiment. I didn’t want the fabric to stay oily, but if I washed off the oil with soap, maybe that soap was actually doing the job? I prepared some more samples and tried both.

Finally, I dried the samples with a hair dryer and called in an impartial observer (my husband) to tell me which samples were the cleanest. Here’s how he ordered them, from largest glue residue to smallest:

1. A, control (not washed off at all).
2. B, vinegar.
3. G, olive oil that has not been rinsed. He said it was clearly cleaner than Sample B.
4. F, olive oil, which I washed with hand soap.
5. N, white spirit, not washed. It didn’t look very clean yet, he said.
6. C, Pantene shampoo.
7. D, a brightening shampoo.
8. Uh, white spirit washed off with soap. “These last three were very similar,” said my judge.

Imagine: The chemicals did exactly what the chemist predicted. I feel like the cleansing shampoo is the real winner here, because even if I didn’t have to worry about the safety profile of the white spirit – say, I wash the silicone off the sheet – I would have to supplement them with soap to get the best result at the show. In this case, it would be wiser to simply use a cleansing shampoo.

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