Homemade water based pomade test

Today, I decided to explore making a pomade on my own.  I know…! After reading the ingredient list on the various jars, I concluded: how hard can it be?  My preference being water based pomades, I was hoping to find a “chemical free” water recipe.  There are  good number of oil based or wax based recipes, but I only managed to find one “water” recipe.  See below.   Thank you to the folks at “Going Ever Green” for publishing it.  The recipe called for flaxseed as the gel-a-fying agent.  Flaxseed was easy enough to find at my local health foo store for just a few dollars.  The recipe called for vitamin E oil and essential oil for fragrance. I opted for a sweet tangerine essential oil fragrance for this first test.

Boiling the flaxseed was interesting enough as the water started to thicken fairly quickly.  Without knowing how long to boil the mixture, I stopped by the time the water was almost like a jelly.  Now here comes the fun part  – filtering the gel from the seeds.  I was expecting the seeds to change during the boiling, but they did not.  Maybe a tad bigger, but nothing really noticeable.  After separating the seeds from the gel, I added the oils and the honey.  I mixed as well as I could with a fork.  In retrospect, a food beater would probably been a better idea to a get a perfectly homogenized solution.  Nevertheless, it looked like what I was expecting.  It was thick and sticky, but still somewhat liquidy.

The recipe indicates to put the solution in the fridge.  I assumed that this refrigeration process would somehow solidify the jelly.  By morning, it had not.  It was more or less a liquid goo.  Not appealing enough to actually try in my hair.  In fact it looked like nothing resembling any pomade I have seen. The below image is after 7 hours in the fridge.

Honestly, I was pretty happy with this first test as it felt close enough to something that could be an acceptable pomade.  Obviously, more testing will have to be conducted to gauge the ingredient quantities and possibly use different ingredients such as gelatin to obtain that familiar commercial water based pomade feel.

My next DIY test will be with beeswax and oil.  There are numerous recipes and I have already tried a homemade pomade made with this.  It was nice looking and certainly offered good hold.  I think that using this approach will be a good learning experience and give decent results.  The ultimate goal would be to apply these teaching to perfect a water version.

The recipe was found here: http://www.goingevergreen.org/how-to-make-homemade-hair-pomade.html