Formulation
here's a useful exercise. next time you're in a store or browsing online for personal care, pick up any shampoo and look at two things: the front of the bottle and the back of the bottle.
the front will tell you a story. it will say things like 'enriched with argan oil,' 'powered by biotin,' 'infused with keratin protein.' there will be icons — a leaf for natural, a shield for protection, maybe a molecule diagram for science. the design will be either very clinical or very botanical, depending on which type of consumer they're targeting. the front is marketing
now flip it over. the back has the ingredient list, usually in tiny text, ordered by concentration from highest to lowest. this is the product. not the front. the back.
there's a rule in cosmetic chemistry that most consumers don't know: the first five ingredients in any personal care product typically make up 80-90% of what's in the bottle. the remaining ingredients — the ten, fifteen, twenty items listed after those first five — share the remaining 10-20%. many of the 'hero ingredients' that are featured prominently on the front of the bottle are present at concentrations below 1%.
this doesn't necessarily mean those ingredients are useless at low concentrations. some actives (like certain botanical extracts) can be effective at very small percentages. but when a brand puts 'ARGAN OIL' in large type on the front of the bottle, and argan oil is the fifteenth ingredient on the back, behind sodium chloride (table salt, used as a thickener) and fragrance — the marketing and the reality are telling very different stories.
sodium chloride is worth pausing on. table salt appears in a surprisingly large number of shampoos. it's used as a cheap thickening agent — it makes the formula feel more substantial and luxurious in the bottle. it has no benefit for your hair or scalp. in fact, salt can be drying and irritating, especially for colour-treated hair. but it's extremely cheap, so it's widely used. if you see sodium chloride in the first ten ingredients of your shampoo, that's a significant percentage of what you're paying for.
here's what our ingredient list looks like. take the argan shampoo as an example.
the first five ingredients: purified water, sodium cocoyl isethionate, cocamidopropyl hydroxysultaine, sodium methyl lauroyl taurate, decyl glucoside. that's water plus four surfactants. all four surfactants are coconut-derived, all four are classified as gentle, and together they form a cleaning system that produces a creamy, dense lather without stripping natural oils. the base — the thing that makes up the vast majority of the formula — is genuinely well-built.
then come the functional ingredients: glycerin (a proven humectant that draws moisture into the hair), hydrolysed vegetable protein (strengthens hair strands from within), argan oil (conditions and adds shine), shea butter (deep moisture and barrier repair), apricot seed oil (lightweight conditioning). these aren't at 0.01% for label decoration. they're present at levels where they actually do something.
what's not in the list is equally important. no sodium chloride — we don't use salt to artificially thicken the formula. no dimethicone or any other silicone — no synthetic coating on your hair. no SLS or SLES — no sulfate-based detergents. no parabens or phthalates.
the ingredient list is also worth reading for what order things appear in. in many brands, the 'star ingredient' (the one featured on the front) appears after preservatives, thickeners, and fragrance. that means its concentration is likely below 1%. if the star ingredient is higher up the list — above fragrance, above preservatives — it's present at a meaningful concentration.
we think ingredient transparency shouldn't require a chemistry degree. but it does require looking at the back of the bottle instead of the front. the front tells you what the brand wants you to believe. the back tells you what you're actually buying.
every moosh product has a full ingredient list on the label and on the product page. the ingredients page on our website explains what each ingredient does and why we chose it. we're not hiding anything because we don't need to. the formula is the product. the packaging is just what carries it to your shower.
read the back. not the front.
