Natural vs. Synthetic: What’s Really Happening to Your Scalp

We’ve been making shampoo bars with nothing but plant-based ingredients since 1982. We have a perspective. But we also believe informed customers make the best customers — so here’s the science, as clearly as we can lay it out.

Start With the Scalp: A Quick Primer

Your scalp is skin — living, breathing, oil-producing skin — and it’s the environment your hair follicles live in. A healthy follicle sits in a well-moisturized, lightly oiled scalp. That’s the condition under which hair grows strong, stays rooted, and sheds at a normal rate.

Your scalp produces sebum, a natural oil, to protect itself and the hair shaft. Sebum also keeps the outer cuticle of each hair strand lying flat. Disrupt this system repeatedly, and you create conditions that can lead to irritation, dryness, excess oil production, breakage, and a compromised environment for healthy hair growth.

So this is the environment your shampoo interacts with every time you wash. The ingredient that does the cleansing matters more than most people realize.

How Synthetic Detergents Work

Most conventional shampoos build around synthetic surfactants — most commonly Sodium Lauryl Sulfate (SLS) or its slightly milder cousin, Sodium Laureth Sulfate (SLES). Manufacturers engineer these petroleum-derived compounds for one purpose: to break down oil and create foam.

They do that job extremely well. The problem is that they don’t distinguish between the buildup you want removed and the sebum your scalp needs to stay healthy. SLS strips both with equal efficiency. As a result, you end up with a scalp that’s been cleaned past the point of balance.

For some people, the consequences show up quickly:

The scalp overproduces oil to compensate for what was stripped, creating a wash-more-often cycle
The hair cuticle, aggressively lifted during cleansing, becomes rough and dull and needs conditioner to smooth it back down
Scalp irritation can encourage the growth of bacteria and fungi associated with dandruff and flaking
For those with sensitive skin, SLS is a known irritant, and regular exposure can erode the skin barrier over time

In fact, this isn’t a fringe concern. SLS is one of the most studied cosmetic ingredients in dermatological literature, precisely because it commonly causes reactions — even in people who don’t identify as having “sensitive” skin.

How Plant-Based Cleansing Works Differently

J.R.LIGGETT’S shampoo bars build on saponified vegetable oils — olive, coconut, and castor oil that go through saponification, the same basic chemistry people have used to make soap for thousands of years. The cleansing mechanism works fundamentally differently from synthetic surfactants.

Saponified oils cleanse by binding to dirt and excess sebum and rinsing them away, but they do so without the aggressive stripping action of petroleum-based detergents. They reduce the scalp’s natural oil layer to a healthy level rather than eliminating it entirely, and they clean the hair cuticle without roughing it up.

Long-term users consistently report these practical outcomes:

Hair that needs washing less frequently, as oil production normalizes over several weeks
Improved scalp comfort, particularly for those who previously experienced itchiness or dryness
Reduced or eliminated need for conditioner, because the cuticle never gets aggressively lifted in the first place
Hair that looks and feels healthier over time rather than dependent on product to appear that way
Side by Side: The Key Differences

Here’s a straightforward comparison of how the two approaches differ at the ingredient level:

What About “No-Poo” and Other Trends?

In recent years, the “no-poo” movement — skipping shampoo entirely or washing only with water — gained a following among people frustrated with the strip-and-compensate cycle of synthetic shampoos. The logic makes sense: if your shampoo causes the problem, stop using it.

However, most scalps do need some level of cleansing, especially in environments with pollution, hard water, or regular product use. Water alone doesn’t dissolve sebum effectively, and buildup over time can clog follicles and create its own problems.

So in a sense, a plant-based shampoo bar is the middle ground the no-poo movement was reaching for: a cleanser that works without the harshness that made people want to quit shampooing in the first place. You get the clean without the consequences.

A Note on “Sulfate-Free” Liquid Shampoos

The rise of sulfate-free liquid shampoos responds to the same concerns. If SLS is the problem, removing it is a reasonable approach. What’s worth noting, though, is that many sulfate-free liquids replace SLS with alternative synthetic surfactants — milder, but still synthetic, and still needing preservatives, emulsifiers, and water to stay stable in liquid form.

A shampoo bar made with saponified oils needs none of those additions. The bar itself stays stable and concentrated, free from the preservatives that liquid formulas need to prevent bacterial growth. Fewer ingredients. Less processing. Less packaging. The same result — or better.

What We’ve Learned in 43 Years

When J.R. Liggett started making shampoo bars from a rediscovered 19th-century recipe, the personal care industry was moving firmly in the opposite direction. People considered synthetic detergents modern. More ingredients meant more technology, and more technology meant better.

Yet four decades of loyal customers have shown the opposite is often true. Simple ingredients that work with your scalp’s biology, rather than against it, don’t need reinvention every few years. They don’t need a new delivery system or a clinical-sounding additive to justify their price. They just need consistent, careful craftsmanship every time.

That’s what we’ve been doing since 1982. And we don’t plan to change the formula.