Hair conditioner made using lignin, a polymer found in wood and bark, works just as well as a commercial product – as long as you don’t mind the smell
By Madeleine Cuff
21 February 2025
The black hair conditioner on the left is derived from the wood powder on the right
Fengyang Wang/Stockholm University
This sustainable, wood-based hair conditioner may be pitch black and smell like peat, but its creators claim it could be the future of haircare after tests suggest it may work just as well as commercial products.
“We are using the power of nature,” says Ievgen Pylypchuk at Stockholm University in Sweden. “We combine a high level of science with old traditions… [to] get something really cool: simple, useful and quite effective.”
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Pylypchuk and his colleagues used lignin, a polymer that is a central component of wood and bark, as the starting point for their bio-based conditioner. When extracted from wood, lignin naturally interacts with water while also acting as a surfactant, a key component of detergents. It also contains natural antioxidants, which help to preserve the conditioner, and provides UV protection, says Pylypchuk. “Lignin serves as a multifunctional platform in this context,” he says. “It protects against UV, it is moisturising.”
The researchers combined a lignin gel developed in their laboratory with coconut oil and water to make the end product. Team member Mika Sipponen, also at Stockholm University, claims it works almost as well as commercial conditioners. When used on samples of wetted bleached human hair and then washed out, it reduced the “drag” when combing the hair while it was still damp by 13 per cent, compared with the commercial product they tested, which reduced drag by 20 per cent.
One potential downside is that the current formulation of the conditioner is “pitch black” and smells like “cooked wood”, similar to peat, says Sipponen. That hasn’t deterred the researchers from contemplating commercialising it. They tested the formula on hair, towels and pig skin, and say it washes off without leaving stains. Even the smell is quite pleasant, says Pylypchuk. “I personally like it very much, and most of the people in our lab – maybe because they work with lignin – they liked it.”