As summertime rolls around, it’s a great opportunity to put down the hot tools and embrace your hair’s natural texture. Tousled, touchable beach waves that air dry to perfection seem to never go out of style, so adding a wave spray to your summer hair styling regimen is key. But with a myriad of wave sprays on the market, the question comes down to which ingredients are best for creating that soft, piece-y texture: do you choose a salt spray or a sugar spray?
What’s the difference between salt spray and sugar spray?
Both salt and sugar sprays will help encourage natural waves and curls, as well as add a bit of grit to the hair to help achieve that effortless beachy look. The biggest difference between the two ingredients? How the salt and sugar behave on your hair.
Salt is great at providing that grit and texture to hair for a tousled style, but similar to the way eating salty foods dehydrate your body, salt also tends to suck moisture out of the hair; this can leave your strands feeling crunchy and straw-like. If you have color- or chemically treated hair, salt can especially be a nightmare—it can deactivate keratin treatments and actively pull color out of the hair, potentially ruining your treatments. Not to mention, have you ever tried to brush out your hair after spritzing it with salt spray? It can leave behind a white flaky residue and make your hair into a tangled mess—not exactly the effortless summer style we’re looking for!
Sugar, on the other hand, is a natural humectant—this means it works to bind moisture to your locks, helping to hydrate your strands while giving you that perfect beach wave that’s also soft to the touch without that unwanted “crunch.” Even more than that, sugar effectively creates moisture and shine because it’s hygroscopic (meaning, it attracts moisture from the air around it), resulting in softer, shinier waves.
When it comes to sugar and your hair, keep in mind you can have too much of a good thing: OD-ing on sugar can make your hair sticky or frizzy. The key to perfect beach waves? Making sure your sugar spray product is formulated with moisture-locking ingredients—and just as importantly, the right amount of those ingredients—to effectively seal the strands, allowing the sugar to then pull just the right amount of moisture into your hair.
Make waves & spray your hair with Superfoods
Our Briogeo Superfoods™ Banana + Coconut Soft Wave Texture Spray is salt-free, alcohol-free, and strikes this perfect balance. It’s enriched with coconut sugar to provide the grit and tackiness to define your hair’s natural wave (while binding moisture to your strands) and a polysaccharide polymer to lock in moisture, resulting in soft, touchable, hydrated waves. An added bonus: coconut sugar is high in antioxidants, so it helps protect your hair from free radical damage!
If you’ve never treated your hair to a hydrating sugar spray, good news: our Soft Wave Texture Spray is super-easy to use on all hair types and textures, and can be incorporated into your daily healthy hair routine all year long!
