OOKISA Hair System Has Some Happy Side Effects

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At Racked LA, some of us are obsessed with our eyelashes. For others, it's hair. In our case, it's always been a compulsion to find the perfect color -- and this compulsion started really early, and we've maybe not seen our real hair color since the age of 12. That's a lot of years of dying, and no matter how much Frederic Fekkai and MorrocanOil you saturate it with, your hair does get a bit tired.

Enter OOKISA. Which we'd first seen in annoying internet ads that showed a Japanese-dolly figure with thin, haggard looking hair which got miraculously fattened up by OOKISA. We liked the idea, but come on, we are not the type to buy something from an internet ad, especially when it's an internet ad sitting next to one of those "follow this 1 weird secret to cut down on your fat" internet ads.

You can understand how excited we were when a PR rep offered us a trial.

Into the shower we went. The shampoo has a vaguely old-skool, old-lady shampoo smell, kinda like Wella from the 80s. Since OOKISA shampoo is sulfate-free, it doesn't generate a lot of lather. We were mildly alarmed that the shampoo seemed to suck all the moisture out of the hair. It was like we had a big red tumbleweed on our head. We moved quick-like to the conditioner.

The conditioner has an OK aroma, good viscosity; after we put it on, we were able to comb the hair with very little effort. Out of the shower, towel dried it a bit, hit the mousse, and passed a blow dryer over the whole thing for about a minute.

Obviously, we can't attest to the mousse's styling properties, but our hair did feel more voluminous. Yes, shiny to the eyes and silky to the touch. Not bad.

We went on about the day, the hair felt good (we are compulsive hair-strokers). The kit includes a PM component that is supposed to be sprayed on the roots of your hair and the scalp before you go to bed. We gave the tresses a few squirts and massaged it in, as per the directions. A little cool, but nothing that made us think scientific innovation was hard at work on our follicles.

The next morning got off to a bad start -- long story about a vagrant who comes round the neighborhood, foraging for cans, and he got into a fistfight with the landlord, the cops had to be called, yadda yadda, and there was no time to wash the hair. We stuck it under a showercap, and moussed up before we left the house.
Again, another day of nice feeling hair. A few squirts of the PM miracle, off to bed, up in the morning, no time to wash or rinse, so we repeated the mousse and went on our way.

We started to think about how long it had been since the hair was washed. Ordinarily, we're super-sensitive to that horrible greasy feeling, but we didn't feel anything. It felt pretty clean, almost like just washed.

The shampoo and conditioner may or may not pump up the volume on skinny locks, but the PM spray and the mousse, together, can buy you three or four days in between washings -- maybe longer if you don't work out and get all grimy-sweaty like we do. But it's kind of a miracle.

Here's the thing that made us think, wow this stuff really is magic: Sunday morning, we rousted ourselves from bed and looked out the window at the sluggish drizzle. To run or not to run? It didn't look too bad, so we laced up our kicks and drove to our favorite trailhead.

By 6am, the rain was coming down. Actual rain, not just pitter-patter. And that's LA rain, filtered through LA clouds -- which is to say, probably semi-toxic. And our hair soaked up two hours of it, marinating a mix that already included the residue from not having washed it for a couple of days.

NASTRO.

For reasons that would take a long time to explain, we had to forgo the hairwashing again. We toweled it off, plopped in some mousse, spent a minute under a blowdryer?and the hair looked amazing. Lots of body, thick ends. It wasn't super glossy, but it wasn't dull, either. And no greasy face/scalp cooties sensation whatsoever.

It's impressive enough to make us think OOKISA is alchemy.

The verdict is still out on how well OOKISA achieved its purported goals -- and we mean that literally; we are still using it and evaluating how much it thickens and strengthens hair, which are its big marketing claims. But we feel like we stumbled on a miracle, probably like the guy with high blood pressure who went to the doctor, got a prescription for drug thinner and then went back two weeks later and said, "It didn't lower my blood pressure, but man, I got a 12-hour boner!" (Which describes the fortuitous accident that ended up being Viagra.)

So the fact that using the OOKISA products mean you need to wash your hair a lot of less may ultimately make your hair healthier?which does not necessarily mean it's the products that are doing it. Ehhh, who knows? All we can say is that, overall, we're pretty satisfied.

Now comes the fine print. The products are fairly pricey: you can buy 6 oz of shampoo for $40, and that miracle nighttime serum is $63. For our money, we'd probably stick with the mousse and nighttime serum, but as we're always compelled to say, your experiences may vary.
· OOKISA [Official Site]
· All We Did It for Science content [Racked LA]