My hair is bleached, which means I’m constantly in search of new treatments to help add moisturize, shine, and strength. Unfortunately, most hair masks are expensive AF. If a treatment using natural ingredients I already have in my pantry can give me the same kind of results as a professional product, it would make my life a lot easier, so when I heard about a peanut butter hair treatment, I was eager to try it.
Ingredients
Before I basically turned myself into the peanut butter baby, I wanted to research the ingredients in peanut butter to see if they held any validity. I have natural peanut butter in my pantry, which means it only has four ingredients: peanuts, fractionated palm oil, sugar, and salt. I figured sugar and salt wouldn’t do much, so I just looked at the first two.
Peanuts
I know that protein is good for your hair since I have a few protein treatments laying around, and I know that peanuts have protein. Peanuts certainly seem to be a good part of a diet for healthy hair, considering they contain biotin, which helps your hair grow. Do these qualities translate to a direct application?
Palm Oil
Red palm oil is super popular for hair, skin, and nails. The only problem—it’s not pure red palm oil inside my peanut butter, but fractionated oil, which has been refined to have a longer shelf life. Does fractionating the oil take away the moisturizing benefits?
Putting It to the Test
Here’s the before picture of my hair.
Yeah, I know—it’s pretty starved for moisture. I dug a spoon into the PB and applied it to my hair. It was extremely sticky and hard to spread around, so much so that I decided to only do one side of my hair and keep the other half as a control group. I ended up sticking my hair under the faucet, figuring the moisture would help me spread the peanut butter better. It worked a little bit.
I got the peanut butter in my hair and noticed two things. First, I kind of like the peanut butter tint. Maybe I should go for a darker shade of blonde? Second, my hair was extremely stiff—it almost felt like I’d put wax in it. I decided to leave the peanut butter in for an hour and rolled my hair up into a Princess Leia-like bun so that I wouldn’t get peanut butter all over my house.
Time to wash it out. The ponytail was trapped inside my hair because all my peanut buttered strands had stuck together and tangled. A few of my ends broke off with very little persuasion. I wasn’t feeling too good about the peanut butter hair treatment. I washed it and felt like I was rubbing, scrubbing, and pulling PB chunks out of my hair for 30 minutes. I washed it with shampoo. When I finally felt I’d gotten it all, my hair felt… extremely dry. Whaaaat. I conditioned it and got out of the shower disgruntled.
Conclusion
Comparing sections side-by-side (peanut buttered hair on the right), it does seem like the peanut butter hair treatment gave my hair some moisture. It looks smoother and more voluminous. Will I try this again? Probs not. It was sticky, messy, hard to apply and wash out, and I don’t feel like the results were good enough to warrant a second try, but maybe it will work better for you.