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Philip Kingsley is the renowned haircare brand behind best-selling products including elasticizer (£21, Lookfantastic.com) and swimcap (£24, Lookfantastic.com). Now, there’s another product on my radar that revived my rapidly thinning hair: the body building weightless shampoo (From £12, Lookfantastic.com).
For the full 500ml bottle, it does cost £44, which yes, is an expensive shampoo, I grant you that. But I want you to stick with me on this one because it really is a godsend for those prone to hair loss. Whether it’s post-partum-related, you’ve always had fine hair, or you (like me) fell unluckily onto the consequences of bad-quality water, the body building shampoo is a must-have.
For a bit of context, I spent one month travelling around south east Asia and, in the same way you’re not supposed to drink the water, there’s plenty of advice circling the internet to suggest that you shouldn’t subject your hair to it, either. Being a blasé backpack-living traveller, I dismissed this as unhelpful nonsense and went about my touring.
As it happens, the water in Bali (where I spent two weeks) is very hard and can cause the hair to become brittle and snap. It’s worth noting that hard water is, of course, not exclusive to Bali and can be experienced everywhere from Bangkok to Blighty. And indeed, while my hair loss problems did kick off Bali-side, they certainly didn’t cease once I touched UK soil.
Backstory aside, the brief for any new volumising shampoos I sought out was as such: It needed to mask growing bald patches towards my forehead, make broken ends appear more robust and stop the hair from clumping into lack-lustre sections. Keep reading to discover how I got on with the Philip Kingsley body building weightless shampoo.
How I tested
Every time I used the body building weightless shampoo I tried to give it the same treatment as I would my go-to hair products: a quick 20-minute speed shower and a very rushed blow dry pre-work. I wanted to see if I’d notice results even without the due care and attention a stylist might give me and, as you can see above, my before photo was shot by a very bleary-eyed version of myself at 5:42am. What I was dealing with? Well, bald patches were developing around my forehead, my locks had absolutely no volume past my crown and big sections of hair were grouping together (making the thinness more evident).
You can see the immediate and more long-lasting results of the product in the picture below, but for a granular breakdown of its effects, from texture to appearance, keep reading.