Photo Credit: Leonor Greyl

LEONOR GREYL’S HAIR FIX: MASQUE QUINTESSENCE

02-25-14 | Posted by Charu Suri

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Leonor Greyl is a brand that is all about paraben-free and natural ingredients (the Ecocert symbol means business), and its latest Masque Quintessence ($145) is the ultimate weapon for desperate hair, which means it’s fit for hair that has been colored, dyed, processed, bleached…you name it.

A weekly spa date for your locks, it is made with rare nourishing ingredients (cupuaçu oil from the Amazon and manketti oil from northern Namibia). The first thing you’ll notice is its fragrance. As with all Leonor Greyl hair products, this is not that sickly sweet scdent you get from say, opening a bottle of bubble bath, but the feeling of sniffing fresh honeysuckle from right outside your window.

The fragrance hits you on the nose (mock orange and linden are strong notes)—but in a good way. The idea is to apply this masque to dry hair before you shower, and wait for 10 to 20 minutes before rinsing off (the packaging advises to comb the hair during rinsing to prevent tangles). Manketti oil is derived from a specifically protected tree in Namibia, and the reason that Leonor Greyl uses it is because it is very rich in linoleic fatty acid, which promotes hair regeneration and restores texture. The cupuaçu oil hails from the Amazon, where it has been used traditionally for ages to create thick, luxurious hair (Ojon’s harvests come from Central America, and theirs is a similar story).

A 10 minute treatment yields soft, manageable, and marvelously fragrant hair: it’s a hair trip to the fragrance vaults of the best Parisian perfumer. The packaging is also updated and luxurious, with a gold lid and the masque inside a Plexiglass jar with black text.

At $145 for this masque, you may wonder if it’s worth the cost. When you consider you’re reversing your hair damage in minutes, hydrating every strand with powerful antioxidants and oils, and helping to preserve your hard-won hair color, $145 seems a small price to pay rather than a visit to your hairdresser. A little bit of the masque goes a long way, and a jar could give you weekly treatments for well over four months (conservatively).

Desperate hair has met its (very fragrant) match.