Review :: ASP Kitoko Dandruff Control Cleanser

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Review
3
  • Ingredients
  • Wash
  • Scent
  • Price

Summary

This may looks and feel like a real top end luxurious wash but the list of needless known contact allergens and the high price put me off recommending this to anyone who suffers dry scalp dandruff. There are other better options out there.

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User Review
3 (1 vote)

buy now on Amazon ASP’s Kitoko range has won numerous awards in recent years and their dandruff control cleanser came highly recommended.  I decided to change tack for this review.  In previous reviews, I’d read the ingredients before shampooing.  As the ingredients in those shampoos could strip wallpaper, I didn’t have the best of hair washes with them.  With Kitoko I decided to wash first then check what the heck I’d put on my hair.  I don’t recommend this approach ever, by the way, I just wanted to enjoy washing my hair for one wash.  This site is ruining me…

Kitoko are a company with a very modern minimalistic brand and the shampoo arrived beautifully packed.   The bottle is quite a hard plastic, possibly to show the quality of this brand, however, it’s hard to get the shampoo out the bottle.  Doh!   The shampoo felt more like a cream than a shampoo, a silvery sleek thick cream with a very light scent.  It doesn’t foam either, making me believe that this shampoo is sulfate free, can only be a good thing.   To be honest, the shampoo felt more like conditioner than shampoo, but a really luxurious conditioner.  None of your cheap stuff.  If this is the trade-off for having a sulfate-free shampoo then I’m in!  After washing my hair felt fantastic.  Quite why anyone needs to buy the conditioner/balm with this is beyond me as my hair felt fully moisturized and my scalp didn’t feel like I’d removed the top layer of skin.   The ingredients must be good, mustn’t they?

The ingredients they put in are Kitoko are a mixed bag.   There’s plenty of really good natural ingredients in here.  I could feel that as I washed.  It’s totally sulfate free but still feels luxurious which is no mean feat.  Kudos for adding really gentle surfactants like Sodium Cocoyl Isethionate, Stearic Acid and Decyl Glucoside rather than the still too typical SLS or SLES. There are no less than five separate skin and hair conditioning agents in this shampoo; Decylene Glycol, Sodium PCA, C12-13 Alkyl Lactate, Shea Butter and Magnesium Nitrate. There are also a few antioxidants too; Green Tea Extract, Spathodea Campanulata Flower Extract and Retinyl Palmitate. Two anti-inflammatories (Green Tea Extract and Grain Of Paradise Seed Extract) complete a shampoo that will moisturize and calm your itchy dry scalp.

So far so good!

Unfortunately, there are also some really disappointing ingredients in there.  The most disappointing for me are the fragrances.  The scent is almost non-existent but they’ve added some of the harshest fragrances out there.  If you were a manufacturer of shampoo and branded that shampoo “ultra-gentle”, wouldn’t you make sure that your fragrances weren’t known contact allergens?  Contact Allergens that the EU has forced all manufacturers to list on their packaging?  ASP have added three (Butylphenyl Methylpropional, Linalool and Limonene) which absolutely baffles me.  In addition they’ve added Kathon CG, a preservative responsible for an epidemic of skin allergies in recent years.  To add insult to injury they have added Tocopheryl Acetate, a moisturizer that gives the hair plenty of Vitamin E but gives a lot of people acne.  Doh!

This could have been an excellent dry scalp shampoo.  If only ASP didn’t add that handful of quite frankly pointless fragrances, moisturizers and preservatives.  Don’t get me wrong, this is still a great shampoo if those ingredients don’t affect you.  The problem is, they affect so many of us.  Me included – I have the red face to prove it.

Such a shame!

Author

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  • The site owner. I founded, and have ran this site for too many years now. I have extremely sensitive skin, have suffered from seb derm for all my adult life and this site is my way of doing something about it. Check out my sister site at safehouseholdcleaning.com

2 thoughts on “Review :: ASP Kitoko Dandruff Control Cleanser”

    • Hi carlo

      There’s not really any obvious ingredients designed to help scalp psoriasis – its more formulated to help with a dry itchy scalp. The most obvious psoriasis shampoos typically contain coal tar and/or salicylic acid.

      Reply

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