Moroccanoil – Texture Clay

The 53 Karat salon is a place I have been going to for a number of years. This is mostly a hair styling shop but they offer a near complete spa experience. They also have a very wide selection of hair care and hair styling products.  Their shelving displays are actually quite attractive. Every time I am in, I end up taking a look at what new styling products they have in store.   And more often than not, they have one or two new brands for men.  So as part of my visits I ended up speaking to Eve Parr the owner,  about the style4men.ca project.   She turned out to be quite receptive in having some of the products sold in her salon featured on Style4men.ca.

For this first collaboration, Eve chose to get me to try the Moroccanoil Texture Clay.  As a successful Hair Stylist, I have to tell myself that if she picked this product for me, there has to be something to it.

Moroccanoil is a fairly big brand with products in both the hair care and body care space.  Their branding with a light blue background and orange “M” is easily recognizable. This brand also has a large footprint and is widely available.  As a side note, this is the first time I will be trying a Moroccanoil product. From a shopping perspective, this makes things a little easier.  At $29 CND for 75 g it is not an inexpensive styling solution, but since this is a clay, you will get a number of months of daily styling out of it.

So the testing of this product was this morning. After washing my hair I towel dried it.  Having used clay a number of times and being wiser on the usage of such a product, I now know that clay goes in better and slightly wet or damp hair. With that in mind, I scooped out about a nickel size of the product and relaxed it in my palms and then moved on to the hair application.

Along the way I’ve also been made aware that applying the clay in damp hair is but only the first step of the process.  Using a warm-hot hair dryer thereafter to dry the clay and lock the style in is the winning combination. The heat allows some of the clay ingredients to bond better with the hair. Using this approach I blew dried my hair and finished the styling process.  My hair was dried and styled very quickly. Clay has very nice volumising qualities and I ended up with great height, volume and a natural matte finish.  Normally, I would have used a salt spray while drying my hair to get that volume, but with this clay you can entirely skip that step.

So now with a fairly nice looking mop I combed a few fly-aways. I realize that the style was perhaps a little bit too fluffy for my lifestyle so I decided to lock it in place with some hairspray.   Very nice looking results.  The hair spray added a bit of luster while securing my locks in place.

Here is the rating on a scale of 1 to 5, where 5 is a perfect score and/or level of shine:

• Hold: 3
• Shine: 2
• Texture: 5
• Feel in hair: 4
• Facility to wash out:  5

Men versus Women products

Most of the hair styling products we review are so clearly marketed to men that the question rarely comes up.  With Moroccanoil‘s choice of colours for their branding, the question is wide open: is this a women or men’s brand?   I will go with a simple answer and the one Moroccanoil seams to be going with by not specifying any gender for their line; this is for “hair” not men or women.

Scent-wise this clay is extremely discreet and I can barely identify anything.  My best guess is, vanilla or maybe even caramel, but it is so faint that we can almost refer to this clay as unscented.

Ingredients

As a regular visitor to Style4men.ca, you know that we are always interested in what goes the jars.  Moroccanoil‘s Texture Clay has a fairly lengthy ingredient list, but this is no different than most clays out there.  Clay on its own can’t do the hair fixative job all that well and it needs a fair bit of help from other participants; water, beeswax and vegetable oil for example.  But there are also some of the skin and hair care rock star making cameo appearances on this record: Argan oil, Shea butter, and Aloe Vera.  Not too shabby!  Good to note, there are no parabens or petro-chemicals.

In closing, the Moroccanoil Texture Clay is a nice and healthy clay option that renders fabulous volume.  You can pick up a jar of it or other Moroccanoil products at 53 Karat.