Good hair days are pretty much the holy grail in terms of a great start to the day. It’s amazing how much our hair and its ability to do what we want it to, and to look how we want it to, affects our mood.
It’s like a favourite accessory that we wear day in and day out. To keep it looking its best, there are multiple factors at play. In addition to diet, good hair care products and practices are key to the health of your hair. Because your hair is at its most vulnerable when it’s wet, shampoo and conditioner also play a key part in keeping it looking its very best.
New Zealand MATER Beauty founder Petra Škorić understands the superhuman power of a good hair day. It was through her own dissatisfaction of trial and error using solid hair care bars that she decided to formulate her own.
With bleached and purple-coloured hair, Petra couldn’t find a single solid hair care bar on the market that could keep it looking and feeling its best, so she set out to find her own solution.
The result is a wholly New Zealand-developed and made range – MATER Beauty Hair Care Bars (pronounced maa-ter). The highly concentrated bars of salon-quality super goodness are packed full of active, hyper-nourishing ingredients to help strengthen, moisturise, and smooth to make hair both look and feel fabulous.
“A lot of shampoo bars you can buy are not actually shampoo, but soap, they both bubble and clean but they’re on the opposite sides of the pH scale, with soap being alkaline, and shampoo acidic,” she says.
“Using an alkaline substance (soap) on hair causes the hair cuticles to raise, exposing the inside of the strand and making hair look frizzy and dry and leaving it prone to damage from styling.
“Using an acidic substance (shampoo) does the opposite since it’s in the same pH realm as our skin and hair, so it seals the cuticles, keeping the hair healthy, feeling smooth and looking shiny.”
Petra identified what she perceived as a gap in the market when it came to solid hair care bars.
“I basically created them for people like me that care about the environment and minimising waste, but not to the extreme of being willing to use less than great products like most of the solid hair care bars that I trialled. None of the bars I’ve used over the last few years were usable in the long-term on my hair, all ended up drying it out and causing damage with long-term use and I kept gravitating back to bottled products to fix that damage.”
So, Petra analysed the ingredients, did a tonne of research, and came up with a dream wish list of ingredients to incorporate into a solid format. It took her 29 revisions to perfect the T.L.C Shampoo Bar and 21 iterations for the Good Hair Days Conditioner Bar.
“I didn’t stop until I didn’t feel like I was missing out on anything by using nothing but those bars and I’ve been using just them for the last year on my purple-coloured locks, which definitely require a lot of tender loving care.”
MATER Beauty Hair Care Bars are highly concentrated little bars of super goodness and without the bulky and unnecessary plastic to boot. Each full-sized bar is equivalent to three bottles of traditional liquid product. The T.L.C. Shampoo Bar and Good Hair Days Conditioner Bar are designed specifically with dry or damaged hair in mind, but other hair types will also benefit from them.
T.L.C Nourishing Shampoo Bar is powered by rice protein (to enhance shine and volume), provitamin B5 (Panthenol), MSM (organic sulphur, which both softens hair and promotes hair growth), betaine (to hydrate hair without weighing it down), colloidal oatmeal (to repair and soften), kokum, and mango butter, plus a lightweight oil ester for smooth silky strands, and essential oils for the delightful natural scent.
GOOD HAIR DAYS Super Charged Conditioner Bar is formulated with a high level of conditioning agent along with three main types of ingredients that make hair look and feel fabulous: emollients, humectants, and proteins. Highly concentrated, containing all active ingredients, powered by rice and hemp proteins (to strengthen and smooth strands), provitamin B5 (Panthenol), betaine (a hit of hydration without weighing the strands down), oatmeal, kokum, shea and cocoa butters, plus a Natural Vege Silicone alternative to make hair feel silky smooth, along with essential oils for the delightful natural scent.
Both bars are also free of sulphates, silicones, synthetic colours, animal products, and fragrances.
MATER Beauty Hair Care Bars and Skincare Serums are available online at mater.beauty.
Images supplied