Typology Jojoba Oil is beautiful, versatile and cheap.
One ingredient found in most hair-smoothing lotions is jojoba oil. The oil that most closely resembles your scalp’s own sebum, it does an aces job of naturally smoothing down the outer layer of your hair to create shine. When we’re older, our oil production decreases just as our hair is getting thinner and drier and more in need of this life-giving, shine-enhancing oil. And if you have curly hair, all those bends and turns make it even harder for the natural oils to make their way down to your (oh look, now they’re frizzy) ends.
A few drops (two? three?) of jojoba oil warmed in your hands and raked through your hair (paying special attention to ends) creates an instant and surprising amount of natural shine, and handily subdues flyaways, for a more elegant, less crazy cat lady look. As someone with frizz-prone grey, I fear that my default setting is now crazy cat lady.
A 60 ml (two ounce) bottle of jojoba oil is roughly $10 at the health food store and lasts forever. But if you’re like me and ugly packaging upsets your fragile equilibrium, this three ounce, minimalist beauty from France’s Typology brand is worth the 9.90 euro price.
Jojoba oil is also a stellar cuticle protector during these unprecedented ‘gel sanitizer is ruinous to our hands’ times. A couple of drops onto your fingertips after hand washing and before hand lotion will keep your cuticles from cracking.
And as someone who hits the self-tanner bottle pretty hard in the winter, I put jojoba oil on my fingers before ‘tanning’ (that makes me sound so Jersey Shore) to prevent the tint grabbing onto any dry skin and turning my fingertips yellowish-brown, making me look like a two-pack-a day smoker. (And that alone is totally worth 10 euros.)