Taking a Shine to Natural Ingredients : Beauty: Customers seem to like fruits and veggies in their shampoos. But chemists say these ‘healthy’ additives do nothing for hair.

Take some garlic, rosemary, safflower oil, papaya, a bit of cucumber, lettuce and tomato and what do you have?

A Caesar salad?

Dinner at a posh yuppie restaurant?

The recipe for your Aunt Minnie’s world-famous gazpacho?

Maybe. But it also could be your shampoo or conditioner.

Fruits, vegetables and other exotic ingredients are popular selling points in modern hair products. But many of the nation’s top cosmetic chemists say the additives do far more for a hair product’s image than they do for the hair.

Although none of these exotic substances are considered harmful to your hair or skin, if you are spending more for a bottle of shampoo or conditioner for the benefits of Paraguay tea, you may be wasting your money.

The fact is, nettles, mistletoe and myrrh may sound more agreeable than ammonium lauryl sulfate, quaternium-22 and PVP/VA copolymer. But it is the last three ingredients that really do the work in many shampoos, conditioners, sprays and gels. And if you check the ingredient list of your favorite product, chances are you will find them or something like them--though they may be hiding beneath the Indian cress, asparagus, kangaroo paw flower and the odd smattering of clementine.

“Right now we’re in the herbal age. But there’s no scientific evidence that they do any good,” says Martin M. Rieger of Morris Plains, N.J. Rieger, a retired cosmetic chemist and consultant to the industry, is considered by chemists around the country to be one of the nation’s most knowledgeable experts on cosmetic ingredients.

He and other chemists say that product advertising that claims vitamins and other nutrients nourish or reconstruct hair may be bordering on deceptive.

Hair is dead protein. You can bathe it in as many vitamins, proteins and minerals as you want; it will still be dead.

The object of a shampoo, say the chemists, is to clean your hair and scalp of the oils and dirt that build up naturally. That is why shampoos--cheap or expensive--have detergents such as sodium or ammonium lauryl sulfate. They also need ingredients to enhance the foam (such as lauramide DEA), thicken the liquid (hydroxyethylcellulose, for example) and add color and fragrance. Other ingredients, such as tetrasodium EDTA or DMDM hydantoin, act as preservatives. The products also need a medium to carry everything, usually water.

Detergents work by allowing water to mix with oil. That permits the shampoo to wash away the oil and dirt that make hair feel matted and stiff. But detergents work so well they may leave hair with electrical charges that give it a flyaway character. That not only is unpleasant, but it makes hair resist combing and brushing, increasing damage and breaking.

Conditioning agents solve that problem. The main ingredient is a so-called quaternium or other positively charged substance that neutralizes the electrical charges and leaves the hair feeling and looking soft and silky. Lubricants, such as silicone, also may be used to give hair control and shine. Proteins often are added to a shampoo or conditioner to stiffen the hair and give body. Finally, a substance such as citrus acid is added to leave the hair in its natural, slightly acidic state. This protects the hair shaft by closing the fibrous scales, or cuticle.

Conditioning agents sometimes are combined with shampoos. But they are most effective if they are applied later so they will not be washed away by the detergents.

Gels and sprays use a substance, such as PVP-VA copolymer, to leave a film on the hair that sort of spot-welds it together.

Larry J. Freeman, founder and chief executive officer of Freeman Cosmetic Corp. of Beverly Hills, says the papaya extract in Freeman’s Papaya 3 Minute Hair Reconstructing Treatment “nourishes” the hair.

By nourish, Freeman said he does not mean providing something that is necessary to sustain life, the common dictionary definition.

“You don’t pump new life into something that’s dead,” he said.

Instead, he said, nourishment means “making a dead substance appear to come alive.”

Freeman says some of the substances in his product--amino acids and sea kelp, for example--become part of the porous hair shaft, sort of like filling the holes in Swiss cheese, helping to reconstruct it.

“It gives you a smooth surface to work with. Your hair looks better; it doesn’t break apart; and it’s more manageable,” he said, adding that such reconstruction is short-lived.

Rieger is not convinced. “This is fantasy, I think,” he said.

Freeman said the papaya in his product is a moisturizer.

But in Cosmetic Ingredient Handbook, published by the Cosmetic Toiletry and Fragrance Assn., papaya is listed as a “biological additive.”

The term was invented by Rieger, a member of the association’s nomenclature committee, to describe the function of materials for which the chemists know of no function.

“ ‘Biological additive’ means that some character in (the) promotions (department) is interested in adding something that maybe has some significance to the consumer,” Rieger said. “We do not know what these things do. There’s no scientific data for it.”

Herbs and other exotic ingredients are not the only additives raising questions. Sun blocks, which now are being put in many hair products, may not be effective unless you leave the product in your hair, said John F. Corbett, Clairol’s vice president of technology in Stamford, Conn.

Corbett said he is “somewhat skeptical of putting enormous mixtures of things that are not contributing to the fragrance (or efficacy) of the product in the hope that people will think they are good for your hair.”

“I don’t know why putting a vegetable salad in the hair is better than putting beef stew in the hair,” he said.