It’s a funny old state of affairs when the inclusion of the word “carbs” in the name of a beauty product feels slightly transgressive. In this instance, it’s supposed to suggest absolute fatness and fullness, as though you were a person who still ate bread and pasta, or who did not start screaming and feeling dizzy (with longing, probably) at the merest glimpse of a biscuit.
Color Wow is an excellent range of products made specifically for coloured hair. It was the first company to do root cover-up “make-up” to use between salon visits, and it also makes a slew of effective hair helpers: in particular Get in Shape — 2 in 1 Working Hairspray (£16.50), which is an elastic hairspray that holds everything in place while adding gloss and, if sprayed at the roots and worked in, thickness and volume. Color Wow also makes a styling cream called One Minute Transformation (£9), which is the business if you wake up with tragic nest hair and don’t have much time to faff about. One dollop and it’s as though your parched hair has had a nourishing, wholesome drink.
Its newest products are three hair “cocktails” that address specific issues with coloured hair. There’s a kale one that strengthens, a coconut one that bonds a lubricating film to the surface of the hair to make it sleeker and swishier, and a carb one, called Carb Cocktail (£22), that bonds a high-carb complex to the hair, “fattening limp strands and giving hair style-holding starch”. So it thickens and adds oomph, and it does it really well.
“It does to hair what you do to a work shirt when you iron it
Thickening treatments often leave hair with a weird dry texture, which is hardly surprising. Coloured hair is porous and broken, and the more you colour it, the more broken it gets, so add anything non-emollient (emollients make hair softer and flatter, as opposed to fatter) and it can go straw-like. Carb Cocktail does to hair what you do to a work shirt if you’re ironing it properly: take one floppy, limp shirt, add starch, apply heat (from an iron), and lo and behold — one resplendent voluminous shirt.
There’s plenty of volume here, but no crispness. It makes hair noticeably bigger, while feeling stronger and healthier. The dulling effect of many thickeners is wholly absent. Use a nut-sized blob on towel-dried hair, work it through and blow-dry as normal. NB: the blow-drying — the application of heat — activates the product, so if you don’t use a hairdryer, this probably isn’t for you (without heat, it worked at 20%, which isn’t worth the expense). If you do, though, it is an easy, effective body boost for flat, thin or limp hair.
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