Real-Life Review: TRESemmé Beauty Full Volume

This post is sponsored by TRESemmé, a product of Unilever, as a part of an Influencer Activation for Influence Central. The opinions expressed are all mine, as I’ve generally found my opinions to be the best ones.

If you saw the commercial for the new TRESemmé Beauty-Full Volume collection (you know, the whole “condition before shampooing” stuff), you might have thought to yourself either (a) Why would I wash my hair backwards? or (b) Why did no one think of this before? I kind of thought both and then I thought “How are they going to convince women who have been washing their hair the same way for years and years to reverse their routine?”

Well, it turns out the answer to my last question was: TRESemmé is going to put their new products in the hands of bloggers like me to try it out and share our results! I’m a born skeptic (I began questioning the existence of Santa on my own at age 5), so I was fully prepared to try this stuff and find out that it made my hair dry and frizzy (at worst) or made absolutely no difference (at best). As much as it pains me to say it…I was wrong.

That’s me…being wrong and having a good hair day.

But don’t worry, I still have some complaints. Mainly that it felt super weird to put conditioner on my hair before it was clean. I had to think really hard about it, which is not the easiest thing to do pre-coffee. Luckily the bottles have giant numbers on them to remind you. It was also kind of hard to distribute the conditioner through my hair, but now that I know I like the end result, it’s not a big deal.

According to TRESemmé, the pre-wash conditioner and shampoo have some specially formulated awesomeness (“fiber polishing technology” they call it), so you can’t get the same results from just using your normal shampoo and conditioner in reverse order. I don’t know if that’s true, but I’m too afraid to test it on my own hair (that’s Skeptical Sarah for you)!

The Beauty-Full Volume collection also comes with a mousse, which is not a product I normally use. After moussing up, I let my hair air dry for a few minutes while I did my makeup.

The first style I attempted after using the new TRESemmé collection was my “messy waves” look. I won’t go through a whole tutorial (mostly because I’m still learning to master the process myself), but it involves using a nice thick curling iron and alternating directions of the curl.

After I’m done curling I mess it all up and then spritz with hair spray to hold. The Beauty-Full Volume hairspray is actually my least favorite part of this collection. It’s a little bit of a stiffer hold than I like when I’m wearing my hair down, but to finish a ponytail it’s great. My favorite hairspray happens to be TRESemmé also – it’s the TRES TWO ultra fine mist, level 3.

The Beauty-Full Volume collection also includes a “hair maximizer” which is sort of a cream/serum texture that goes on your hair while damp. I didn’t use it to make this wavy style, but I did use it another day after conditioning/washing and before drying and straightening. I usually associate cream/serum products with giving hair more of a shiny rather than a soft finish, but this one did the opposite. My hair felt super light and airy and it looked like this at the end of the day:

OK, I swear I’m almost done. But I can’t sign off without telling you the main reason I will be using every last drop of the products I received courtesy of TRESemmé and maybe even buying them for myself when I’m out. If you’re just looking at these pictures of my freshly washed and styled hair, you probably don’t see a huge difference compared to how my hair normally looks when it’s freshly washed and styled. The Beauty-Full Volume reverse-order system is supposed to wash out the weight that condition leaves. Honestly, I never felt like my hair was “weighed down” after shampooing and conditioning before. However…

I am a gross, oily girl. Yep, it’s true. I carry oil-absorbing face sheets with me everywhere, because by lunchtime, my forehead shines like a freshly waxed bowling ball. And after one good night’s sleep, the hair around my temples and the nape of my neck is oily and matted. The back of my head that sits against the pillow feels really gross by morning, too. My “second-day hair” usually involves a heavy dose of dry shampoo, and even then the best option is a ponytail. But since I started using the TRESemmé Beauty-Full Volume pre-wash conditioner and shampoo, I have noticed a huge difference in my second-day hair. I can get away with a half-ponytail, and dry shampoo isn’t even necessary.

To me, that’s reason enough to struggle through the weirdness that is washing my hair backwards!

Thanks again to TRESemmé for letting me try these products and for sponsoring this post!