And why silicone sprays are the number one reason why it’s not happening for you & your horse.
Probably our most commonly asked query… “How do I grow my horse's tail back? She’s rubbed it out again!”. Or “How do I get my horse's tail soft and shiny?”
And whilst we do love helping to regrow manes and tails back with our fantastic product REGROW, we like to first look at WHY they’re rubbing it and WHY the tail is not growing soft and shiny.
For this, let’s go right back to basics. Skin being skin and hair being hair.
Human hair & horse hair is pretty similar with the only real difference being that the diameter of horse hair is thicker than humans allowing it to grow longer.
Human skin and horse skin are again pretty similar except a horse's epidermis layer (the top layer) is actually slightly thinner than ours making it more sensitive. Their dermis (second layer) is thicker slightly than ours.
It’s because of these facts, that we are so passionate about treating your horse’s hair and skin like you would your own. If you wouldn’t use something on your hair or skin, don’t use it on your horse. Their skin is likely more sensitive than yours.
Sadly, in the current equine market skin & hair products are made with cheap and pretty awful ingredients that you simply couldn’t and wouldn’t get away with using in human products.
For today I’d like to talk about mane and tail sprays; detanglers!! These sprays have always been a staple in our grooming bags since forever… because that’s what we’ve always been told to use! Most (if not all) of these products contain a high level of silicone, some even advertise as “powerful silicone spray”.
In the human world, we haven’t used silicones in hair care for years and years because it’s so very damaging to not only the hair strands but to our scalp also!
See, silicone is a liquid plastic so it will coat each strand therefore detangling and creating a shine. However, these results are not only short-lived but they cause long-term damage. Silicone is hydrophobic which means it repels water, by doing so it dries out the hair strand and also any skin that it has covered.
Dry hair very quickly becomes weak hair which then becomes broken hair. A real-life scenario with horses is that we use silicone sprays, drying out the mane and tail making it weak. We then add a rug which causes a little bit of friction but is enough to break off this now delicate, dry and weak hair.
Then, the skin! These silicone sprays also affect the skin and upset the balance by drying it out. When you have dry skin yourself, it becomes itchy… right? It’s the same with our horses, they get itchy from the dry skin and then they rub their butts and their manes!