→ この記事の日本語版はこちら / Read in Japanese
In the last piece, I wrote about the despair that pushed me to start making my own product.
Today, I want to pick up the story from there — the winding, mostly chronological record of how Leave-In Treatment Mist No.115 & No.215 actually came into being.
The Concept Was Clear Long Before the Ingredients Arrived
Honestly, the concept for this product was locked in long before I sourced a single raw material.
The non-negotiables, laid out plainly, looked like this:
- The base must contain zero water
- You must be able to feel the benefits of argan oil
- Keep the formulation as simple as possible
- Above all, never heavy
- After application, each strand should stay crisp, dry-feeling, and fully independent from the next
- The shine should not be oily shine — it should look like the natural gloss of undamaged, healthy children’s hair
- It must prevent static
Of all these, today I want to zoom in on the first one — no water in the base — and the unexpected detour I took while sourcing that one ingredient.
Why I Was So Stubborn About “No Water”
This product had to be effective, specifically, as a tool for high-heat styling.
The reason is simple. Around 90% of the stylists at our salon — myself included — work with dry cutting techniques. That means blow-drying and high-heat flat irons come into the equation constantly during the cut.
And when the hair still holds too much moisture at the moment the iron touches it, that moisture turns into steam. That steam is the enemy. Proteins denature under heat-plus-moisture, and the texture of the hair drops visibly — you can feel the quality collapse under your hands.
In salon work, there are countless moments where you pick up an already-dry head of hair and reach straight for the blow dryer or iron. To protect the hair and lift both its texture and its workability in those moments, a product like this isn’t a luxury — it’s indispensable. And to prevent that steam from forming at all, a waterless base was, for me, non-negotiable.
The Base Was Already Decided (Or So I Thought)
So, what do you use instead of water?
I already had that answer, too. An oil widely used in cosmetics — foundations and the like — with a very strong safety profile. A liquid that spreads more thinly than water, with surface tension even lower than water’s.
…Forgive me for not naming the specific ingredient here. It sits too close to the core of the formulation.
I’d worked with this material before, back in Japan, so I knew its feel in my hands. I sourced a small quantity through that same route and brought it with me to the U.S. as carry-on. That was my starting material for prototyping.
At the same time, I placed an order with a U.S. supplier for the same ingredient — same INCI name, same spec. It arrived quickly.
Same name. Same standard. The story should have ended there.
The Closest Word Is Vertigo
I tried the U.S.-sourced material, and for a split second, I got dizzy.
“Wait… this isn’t the same…!!??”
The INCI name was unmistakably identical. It’s a completely standard cosmetic ingredient, widely circulated in Japan too. But the finish was different. My hands could feel it.
How was it different? It’s genuinely hard to put into words, but let me try.
A base material, in theory, should leave “no benefit of its own” behind. That’s the ideal. But the version I’d used in Japan left behind something — a faint, never-excessive, perfectly calibrated trace of moisture on the dried hair.
The U.S.-sourced one — and, as it turned out, almost every one I tested from other U.S. suppliers afterward — left nothing. As if the ingredient had simply evaporated alongside the water, leaving the hair as if nothing had ever been applied.
…Not good.
No — this was a bad feeling. A very bad feeling.
The Detour I Didn’t See Coming
From there began the grind: ordering small quantities of the exact same ingredient from a handful of different suppliers and testing every single one.
This phase — choosing the base — was supposed to take a moment. That was the plan.
It took time. It took money. Bottle by bottle, I checked the feel and the finish, took notes, and placed the next order. Quiet, repetitive work with no visible end in sight. Honestly, there were a few moments along the way where a weaker voice in my head said, “Couldn’t you just use the batch you brought from Japan and be done with it?”
But the whole premise of making and selling this in the U.S. falls apart without a supply chain I can keep running from inside the U.S. Cutting that corner would have quietly undermined the product’s identity.
I kept telling myself that. And I kept testing.
And, Finally — There It Was
After several suppliers, I finally hit one that made me go, “This is it.”
I was relieved. Genuinely, deeply relieved.
But at the same time, something cold ran down my spine.
Even when the ingredient name is 100% identical, what’s actually inside the bottle differs subtly from one supplier to another.
Grade. Purification level. The profile of trace components. Lot-to-lot variation. The kind of thing you’d find buried in a footnote of a cosmetic raw-materials catalog.
But when your own hands tell you, “the INCI is the same and yet the finish is not,” that footnote stops being a footnote. It becomes the whole story.
I’m the One Putting Myself in This Spot
Honestly, this is a level of difference that most people would never detect.
But for better or worse, I’ve spent far too many years with my hands in hair. Every single day, dozens of heads. Drying them, ironing them, finishing them. That accumulation has left me with hands that can’t not notice the smallest shifts in finish.
I’m the one putting myself in this spot.
That, I think, might be the exact phrase for it.
Even something as simple as choosing a base turned into an episode like this. Before I started, I never imagined a single raw material could cost me this much sleep.
And only from here did I finally get to the part I’d actually been looking forward to — layering in the ingredients I actually wanted to do the work, on top of that base.
Next time, I’ll write about the second round of headaches — this time, about my relationship with argan oil itself.
→ この記事の日本語版はこちら / Read in Japanese
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