Our 'Silicone-Free' Conditioner Took Out a Silicone We Grade Low and Left In a Quat We Grade Mid

Eighteen of our fifty-six products say silicone-free. We checked all eighteen against their ingredient lists and every claim holds — not one of them contains a silicone.

That is worth stating, because it almost never happens. Most of the absence claims in this catalogue have at least one product quietly contradicting them. This column is clean.

The claim is still not telling you much, and our own conditioner is the clearest example of why.

What actually conditions hair

Hair has a low isoelectric point, somewhere around pH 3.67, which means that in almost any product you put on it the surface carries a net negative charge. Damaged and chemically treated hair carries more of one, because the cuticle has lost material.

Cationic surfactants are positively charged, so they are pulled onto that surface. Gavazzoni Dias puts it plainly in her 2015 overview of hair cosmetics: they "tend to neutralize the negatively charged net of the hair surface and minimize frizz". The more damaged the hair, the more of them stick.

Silicone works by a different route entirely. It is a hydrophobic film, laid down over the cuticle, and the same review notes that dimethicones "adsorb better on virgin hair and root rather than tips". The two ingredients are not substitutes for each other. They are doing separate jobs, and only one of them is charge-driven.

Which sets up an awkward result. On colour-damaged hair — the exact hair a damage-and-colour-care conditioner is sold for — the quat is where most of the effect comes from, and silicone would have been depositing preferentially somewhere else.

What our conditioner actually runs on

The Dr.Orga Alpine Rose conditioner has forty-six ingredients. The ones doing the work are behentrimonium chloride and starch hydroxypropyltrimonium chloride — two cationics — plus stearyl and cetyl alcohol as the fatty alcohols that build the cream, and a run of plant oils and butters.

We grade behentrimonium chloride mid. We grade the starch quat low.

For comparison, the hair treatment pack we sell that does not claim silicone-free contains five cationics — behentrimonium chloride, steartrimonium chloride, cetrimonium chloride, behentrimonium methosulfate and polyquaternium-10 — plus dimethicone and amodimethicone. Three of those five quats carry our mid flag.

So removing silicone did not reduce the cationic load. The silicone-free product has fewer quats than the silicone one, which is a formulation choice, but the mid-flagged quat is present in both. The claim on the front is about the ingredient that was not carrying the risk grade.

What the European committee found

The Scientific Committee on Consumer Products published an opinion on alkyl (C16, C18, C22) trimethylammonium chloride — cetrimonium, steartrimonium and behentrimonium chloride together — adopted on 17 March 2006, reference SCCP/0917/05.

On behentrimonium chloride specifically, the opinion reports that a 3% solution caused transient conjunctival irritation, and that concentrations up to 5% produced minimal or reversible irritation in animal testing. On sensitisation it is more direct: Buehler and patch testing found no evidence of allergenic sensitisation, and human repeated insult patch testing at 3.4% "did not cause skin sensitization under the experimental conditions described". The use levels put to the committee were up to 5% in rinse-off hair products and up to 3% leave-on.

A separate 2013 paper in Food and Chemical Toxicology went back over post-marketing adverse event data for leave-on body lotions containing the same ingredient, and confirmed the earlier safety assessment.

That is a reasonably reassuring file. Ours says mid.

Chloride, methosulfate, and our own inconsistency

Now the part that is entirely our fault.

Behentrimonium chloride: we grade mid. Behentrimonium methosulfate: we grade low. Both appear in the same hair pack, three lines apart.

These are the same cation. Behentrimonium is the part that binds to hair and does the conditioning; the chloride or methosulfate is the counter-ion sitting alongside it, and it is not what makes contact with your cuticle. There are real formulation differences between them — methosulfate versions are typically supplied in different carriers and behave differently in a mix — but our risk column is not recording a formulation difference. It has one flag for a molecule and a different flag for the same molecule wearing a different salt.

We cannot produce the reasoning. There is no note in the row explaining it. Someone graded them at different times against different sources and nothing reconciled the two afterwards.

That is the third week running that a version of this has turned up, and it is the same root cause each time: risk lives on the product row instead of on a single ingredient record.

What our screening found

The practical takeaway

Silicone-free is a texture preference, not a safety upgrade. People choose it because silicone builds up, weighs fine hair down, or interferes with a colour service, and those are real reasons. None of them are toxicology.

If you go silicone-free, the ingredient to find on the back is the one ending in -trimonium chloride or -trimonium methosulfate, or a polyquaternium number. That is your conditioner. A silicone-free product without one of those is a cream that will feel nice in the shower and do very little once the hair dries.

On damaged or coloured hair, the cationic route is arguably the better one anyway, because it goes where the damage is. That is a genuine argument for the category, and it is not the argument the label makes.

We have written about what hair-loss shampoos can and cannot do and about the dye question nobody in that category answers. On absence claims generally, this is the piece, and our grading method — including the field that caused today's mess — is on the awards page.