I don’t know if this is a problem for parents of little boys—I have 3 little girls. But with little girls comes longer hair. And with longer hair comes…tangles. My oldest girl has pretty fine hair, with only a little wave to it. We don’t have super curly hair in my little family, but we still get tangles. As a matter of fact, my eldest has one section of her hair that is a different texture than the rest of her hair, and it is always a rat’s nest in the morning. That is why detangler (also known as leave-in conditioner if you are buying for adults) is my best friend in the morning. It makes it so much easier to convince an active preschooler to sit still while mommy combs out the “nuts” (what she calls knots).

I ran across this link on Pinterest on how to make cheap detangler. What a neat idea! But I thought surely I can make this “cheap” detangler “free”—cause that’s the best kind of frugality!

I sign up for all kinds of samples online. One of the most common types of samples are shampoo and conditioner in little foil packets. I figured that I could use one of them as the main ingredient for the detangler. This is what I did:

I took one sample pouch of conditioner. The conditioner I used was not an intensive type, to keep my mixture as light as possible. My guess is that this pouch contained about one to two tablespoons of conditioner.



Since my gold old J&J detangler bottle was empty (thus the reason for my need to make detangler), I used that spray bottle, but you could use any empty, clean spray container. I filled about one quarter of the bottle with water that was as hot as my tap would go, to better dissolve the conditioner. I squirted in the entire pouch of conditioner, and then I shook the solution to mix well. I then filled up the rest of the bottle, and then I shook it well again before I used it. We’ve been using it for a couple of weeks, and it has done a great job on my little one’s hair.

And there you go, hair detangler for free!