Egg Yolk and Olive Oil: cheap and natural hair treatment, or sticky mess?

Enough websites and pseudo-scientific sounding articles tout the financial, health and ethical advantages of using "natural" cosmetics and beauty treatments that I was convinced to try one of these kitchen concoctions myself last month. One evening, being out of conditioner and just not bothered enough to drag myself out to the shops I turned to le internet for an alternative. –Searching “natural conditioner” ended up being not the best idea as it returned over 690,000 results. Then I vaguely remembered something about using eggs as a conditioning treatment as they contain some kind of special proteins that are good for your hair, and hey, they feed raw ones to dogs for a glossy coat right? Suddenly I had somewhat improved search parameters.

If you do a search for "egg yolk and olive oil hair conditioner" you get a slew of results such as the one found here at eHow.com. These were not the exact instructions I used, but it gives you a basic idea of the procedure and the ingredients. In the end I used an amalgamation of the first ten or so results I found. My method was as follows:

1) Crack an egg, and separate the yolk from the white. Discard white (or make a reduced fat omelet with it, whatever you gotta do man).

2) Scramble that yolk with a fork.

3)Measure out one tablespoon of olive oil. Pour olive oil into scrambled egg yolk, rescramble contents so that the oil and egg are combined. Here’s what mine looked like:



4) Now go wash your hair and take egg and oil mixture with you.

5) After shampooing and towel drying your hair, carefully pour egg and oil on the top of your head. (Don’t do what I did and spill half of it in the tub, then you have to start over) Do this slowly and carefully as the mixture is rather runny.

6) Spread mixture into hair. (I’d like to say combing the egg and oil through is the best method, but that’s not how it worked for me. I just worked it in to my hair, starting at the root and working down towards the ends as I pulled them up and piled them on the top of my head.)

7) Let the mixture sit on your hair for about twenty to thirty minutes.

8) Rinse hair thoroughly; finish rinse with a run of cold water to improve shine.

My results were better than I had anticipated, but I had anticipated a sticky mess that smelled like salad dressing. The shine factor of my hair was definitely improved, but I didn’t notice those follicles getting that much softer. While this endeavor went over better than I thought it would, I still encountered two problems. First, I failed to rinse all of the conditioner out of my hair. A little bit of the egg and oil remained in my hair overnight, and by the following morning that section of scalp was considerably greasier than the rest. Second, I completely forgot about the risk of salmonella associated with raw eggs, and the fact that rest of my household would kill me if they knew I’d gotten raw egg all over the bathtub and sink. I ended up having to scrub and disinfect the sink and tub before retiring.

The verdict: while I wouldn’t say egg yolks completely fail as a natural hair conditioner, I’d say using them in your hair care is more trouble than it’s worth.