I’ve been buying Charles WorthingtonTake Aways Frizz Taming Serum for a while now, in a futile attempt to make my hair do something vaguely like what I want it to do. I went to buy myself a new bottle the other day, but when I arrived in the shop I realised that I was only buying it out of habit, and in fact it is a complete waste of money. I decided I needed to try something new, but after looking through shelves of over-priced serums and sprays, I went back to the Charles Worthington shelf and decided to give one of the other products a chance. I chose Charles Worthington Take Aways Hair Healer Intensive Leave-In Conditioner and here’s my verdict…
The conditioner comes in a 50ml bottle with a pump action top
to get a small amount of the product out at a time. When I bought it I actually thought it was in a cream coloured plastic bottle, but when I used it I realised that the bottle is transparent plastic, the cream colour is the conditioner. The writing on the front is navy blue and in a fairly simple design, the only thing that never seems to be simple about the Charles Worthington range is the actual product name. I would struggle to remember exactly what the full names of these products were if they weren’t here in front of me. The only other useful information on the front of the bottle is that this conditioner is for all hair types.
The text on the back of the bottle is taken up firstly by a long-winded explanation of the miracles this product will perform, followed by directions for use, and then most of the rest is an extremely long list of ingredients. As usual I take the product advert with a pinch of salt, but I’m left with the overall impression that the product should leave my hair feeling healthier, smoother and glossier. The directions paragraph tells me that this stuff is highly concentrated so I should use it sparingly. That sounds good; hopefully this little bottle should last me a while then. What it actually says is to apply “a small amount”, which is pretty vague, so I took it very literally and applied a tiny amount as directed, using fingertips and combing through towel-dry hair. I was impressed that this tiny amount (only a couple of squirts of the pump) went so far, spreading through most of my long hair, especially since the main problem with the serum I’d been buying in the past was it drying out in my hands and not spreading through my hair.
As I said, the list of ingredients is enormous, so I won’t list them all here; it would be impossible to type them all out, and it’s mostly scientific nonsense to me, certainly not worth it just to make my opinion 200 words longer! The main ingredient is water, and also included are several oils (starflower, evening primrose, jojoba, avocado, almond), colours, fragrance, and others. The ingredients aren’t really important to me, I was surprised there were so many, but I was more bothered to read that it was not tested on animals.
So now the most important part: the results. To be perfectly honest this product surpassed all my expectations and performed most of the miracles it had promised to. I washed my hair exactly as usual, applied the leave-in conditioner, then let my hair dry naturally, so that I could see the results without frizzing it up or drying it out with my hair dryer. The conditioner left my hair feeling smooth and a lot less frizzy than usual, but without losing that clean feeling which can sometimes be a problem with hair products that you don’t wash out. I have tried using a little more of this than I did the first time, but it turned out to be a bad idea, leaving my hair looking a bit greasy, so especially if you have short hair you should definitely just use a tiny amount.
I expect that everyone would have a different opinion of this conditioner, depending on their hair type, but this has great results for me. Equally important for me is the fact that it is reasonably priced at around £1.65 and that one little bottle should last me quite a long time. I wouldn’t go anywhere without this, and my old anti frizz serum (whatever it was called) is going in the bin where it belongs.
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Aug 15th, 2003
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