SOMA Pomade and Finishing Spray – For a Deconstructed Style

This morning was test time for the SOMA pomade and finishing spray.  I came across this brand of hair products during my last visit at OBSCO.

SOMA has a full product line of hair care, from shampoos to the pomade.  The SOMA claim is to be 100% vegan, biodegradable, and free of parabens, formaldehydes and sulfates.  A good sales pitch!  Who doesn’t want to part ways with these nasty chemicals?  The packaging goes hand in hand with this spirit and is simple and uses green as the dominating colour.

It’s a fairly small jar at 59 g.  The norm being more along the lines of 100 g.  If memory serves me right it is sold for approximately $17 and the hair spray goes for $13.

The listed domain name on the packaging is SomaOrganics.com but it has been updated to MySomaHair.com

The pomade has no fragrance and can be considered as unscented.  The ingredient list does mention a fragrance, but my nose can not smell it. The contents of the jar looks like a proper pomade, so this is not a cream,  wax or a clay. I mention this as some manufacturer use these identifier interchangeably.  On contact, I was a little surprised at how soft it was.  It still has a solid consistency, but it is minimal.  It required no relaxing just a bit of rubbing on the finger to spread it.  The pomade application was done on freshly cleaned and dry hair and was very easy as it went in with no resistance.  That kind of made me suspect that the hold would be limited.  I was able to style my hair in the usual pomp and the pomade offered some hold.  This hold started to fade in less than 30 minutes and some hair strands started coming down.  Not a bad look, but not necessarily what I was aiming for.

The very light texture coincides with a high shine result.  This pomade is definitely true to the Greaser’s “shine” spirit.  As is often the case, you can’t get fabulous shine AND awesome hold.  It’s always a compromise.  The SOMA pomade wins on the shine front.  In order to address the limited hold, SOMA also offers a hair spray.  Suspecting that I would need it, I had purchased a bottle.  Experience has taught me that if a pomade maker also had a hair spray, you will most likely need it to hold your 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: 2
• Shine: 5
• Texture: 5
• Feel in hair: 4
• Facility to wash out:  5

BTW – The pomade is so slippery that it took a few takes to get the finger picture, the pomade was sliding off.

So here we are about 30 minutes after the pomade application and I am touching up the styling by using a bit of the hair spray.  Hair spray is a decent solution but also a bit of a contradiction.  According to hair experts there are two main elements that damage hair; heat and alcohol.  Heat from the repeated usage of hot hair dryers and the usage of fixative products with high alcohol contents.  As you may have noticed most hair dryers now a days come with a cold setting.  On the hair spray front, the first ingredient in “ALL” hair sprays is alcohol.  The Canadian ingredient listing requirements dictate that you don’t have to reveal your proprietary recipe, but that you list the ingredients in the order of the most to the least. With alcohol appearing in first position, you do the math… But when all else fails, it is normally a trust worthy solution.

Turning to the SOMA hair spray, it did an OK job of holding my falling locks…but again for a very limited time.  Maybe an hour.  By 10 this morning, I was certainly not sporting a pomp.  It was more like a curly version of the 90’s grunge look.  I suspect that the high oil contents of the pomade made it such that the hair spray couldn’t bond to the hair and dry in place.

Some time ago, a reader was inquiring if pomade could be an option to achieve that 90’s grunge look and I had no answer since most of the pomades I had used up to that point had some level of wax in them and were thus offering stronger hold.  In retrospect, pomades such as this one are a perfect option to create that look.

These products were not suitable for my target style, but they did make my hair feel silky and very nice to touch.  And obviously, if you are after a deconstructed style, these will work great.

 

 

You can shop for these products at OBSCO.  Don’t forget to use the STYLE4MEN discount code.