I’ve been on a hiatus since I’ve been curbing some of my cosmetic shopping over quarantine. I’ve been sticking to my tried-and-true skincare holy grails, and almost completely eschewing makeup since I don’t often leave the house. But I’m back to bring you beauty reviews of the best and worst of my limited number of quarantine purchases!

I grabbed Noughty’s To the Rescue while I was still bleaching my hair earlier this year. While I’m usually exclusive to Sauce’s Intense Repair Conditioner, I had a feeling my super-damaged bleach-blonde hair was picking up the yellow 5 and 6 dyes, making my hair look a little more yellow-brassy than it needed to be. This put me on the hunt for a white/dye-free conditioner, which I found in a pinch while I was out grocery shopping for $8.

To the Rescue has a good ingredient listing involving the usual hair hydrators of coconut oil, olive oil and shea butter, all of which show up close to the top the list. There aren’t any sulfates or drying alcohols in this conditioner. This product is vegan, and Noughty doesn’t test on animals, so those are nice bonuses, as well. The conditioner itself is a standard fare white cream with an equally generic soapy/shea butter scent (which, in my opinion, is a bit overbearing in this product, but it’s not a bad smell, per se…)

But for the contents being so good, this conditioner has terrible performance. I know what you’re thinking: “What do you expect from a $8 shampoo that you get at a grocery store?” — but I’d go as far as to say this conditioner made my hair quality worse. It feels as though the product already mostly absorbed by your skin before you can even make it to your hair! You can’t “pull” the product through your hair because of this aforementioned disappearing act. So your hair never actually feels moisturized during or after application.

When you can get it to “catch” in your hair, it tends to clump up once your hair is dry, even despite any rigorous rinsing attempts. I’ve never been able to describe my hair as both greasy-feeling and dry quite the way I can with this conditioner.

Most conditioners employ silicones that give your hair that “smooth” feeling, which this particular conditioner lacks as in it’s ingredient listing. That’s all well and good, but I suspect that the concentration of shea butter might be too high in relation to everything else, and might have benefited from a greater amount of linalool or seed extracts to make the product less chalky.

Of course, I have testing limitations with only having straight hair, and no product is ever a one-size-fits-all. But I can’t even see this being good for curly hair types, since the cream is too heavy for a “apply and rinse” conditioner. It’s not malleable enough to pull through the entire hair cuticle, which would make your hair texture a mixture of too heavy/greasy and not moisturized at all (frizzy) in other sections.

I can still get behind this company’s stance on natural ingredients and non-animal testing, though. Hopefully I’ll be able to find a product of theirs that works well for me in the future. ~A

Perceived efficacy: 1/5

Longevity: 4/5

How much I actually like this product: 1/5