Thursday, April 4, 2013

Review time! Garnier Fructis Hydra Recharge

It's review time! Today I will be writing a review on the Garnier Fructis Hydra Recharge collection. I will start off by saying I really enjoy garner products in general and this was an exception to that. This collection is designed towards people with dry hair. The shampoo has these cool little micro beads that burst as you rub the shampoo in and it has a really nice later to it. There is a nice thick conditioner in this set plus a 1 minute treatment that is basically like a conditioner on steroids to make your hair all super spiffy and stuff. anywhoo.... Let's get to the review! 

 Do you want to know a secret? *drum roll* i don't really have dry hair. In fact my hair tends to be on the oily side when left to its own devices. HOWEVER, I spend a decent amount of time in a chlorinated pool and so I get the dreaded "pool hair". You know, hair feels dry and greasy at the same time (how does that even work?) and if left alone and not covered by something you either look like a dirty bum or like you have been through a tornado of hairspray to get it to stick straight out behind you. Trust me if you have ever been in a chlorinated pool before with hair longer than an inch you know what I mean. Ugh so gross I pity my bandanna that had to cover that mess.

I should mention here that I am also the mom to a 2 year old with EXTREMELY dry hair. Seriously its like straw. He likes to use the "big boy" shampoo (aka mine because hey it's a spiffy green bottle with cool blue things inside) so I used some of the shampoo on his hair and it's amazingly not like straw anymore. This also brings me to my next point. As I'm sure any mom can tell you, when you have a small child getting a shower everyday is not normal... At all. So I was really pleased that my hair didn't get all nasty and get that whole greaser look going on. When I had to go 2 or more (yeah that's right I said it OR MORE yuck I know) days without a shower my hair stayed nice and pretty and still smelling fantastic so that is a huge thumbs up from me.

So now i will get into some specifics about a few things:

1) At first this shampoo was really hard to get used to. When you first put the shampoo on your hair it feels like you didn't use enough because the micro-beads have not all burst open to create the lather. I thought to myself "well that's crap I'm going to have to use a ton of this stuff" learn from my mistake! if at first when you apply the shampoo to your hair and it feels like it just got soaked up DO NOT USE MORE! Once you get it to work on it will later up nicely and you won't be overwhelmed by suds! 

2) Since it doesn't really have directions on how to incorporate the 1 minute treatment into the shampoo/conditioner routine what I did was use it as a super conditioner 2 times a week in place of the regular conditioner and it worked out fabulously. At first I tried doing shampoo-treatment-conditioner but I felt like that wasn't as effective as it could be and that the conditioner was being somewhat wasted. I also tended to leave it in for longer than a minute. I would apply the treatment, then do other stuff like wash my face and body while it soaked in. I don't know if this helped at all but I can't imagine it hurt. My hair stylist aunt used to always tell me to leave the conditioner on for 5 minutes to get the full benefits so I will just blame that . I also found out that if after everything was rinsed out before I got out of the shower I rinsed one last time with cool water it seemed to make my hair feel softer. Something something sealing hair cuticle *shrug* who knows

3) One of the things I love most about Garnier is that all of their products smell really good while still doing an awesome job on my hair. At first with the initial "sniff test" I thought the conditioner was a little lackluster. I remember thinking that they really dropped the ball because it smelled kinda like a coconut bar of  soap and could have used more fragrance. After I tried it though I realized that the scent is not as upfront as the shampoo and kind of loses that muted soap smell but keeps the light coconut smell. I knew it was a hit when my fiance decided he was going to make our roommates smell my hair because it smelled so good! 

All in all I would totally  buy this again and have already recommended it to a lot of people because its cost effective and does a great job. I'm very very happy that I got the chance to review this with bzzagent! Hope you enjoyed my review! Since I'm not really big with taking pictures of myself have a laugh instead. (Please enjoy this thing was hard as heck to do!)