Tangle Teezer Review

I don’t know if every girl experiences this, but for some time now I’ve noticed that when you have long hair and wear it down, you sometimes get a fine cloud of short squiggly hairs sticking up at all angles around your head (“whispies” / “halo”) – hairs that have probably been torn and broken from brushing. Personally, I like my hair healthy, smooth and squiggle-free and also there’s the point that the more hairs that break around the top of your head, the thinner your hair will be lower down if you want to grow it long.

Thanks to AnitaPeppers on Morguefile for use of this image.

So, a couple weeks ago I was looking online to find what solutions people had for gentle haircare that doesn’t result in hair breakage. There was a lot of good advice like avoiding harsh hair-treatments (dying, heat-treatments), and not wearing hair ties often, and if you do making sure your hair ties are padded and soft (like scrunchies) so that they don’t put too much pressure on the hair. A lot of websites talked about using wide-toothed combs and gently working them through your hair rather than roughly pulling a brush through it. All these things I’d heard of at some point or another, but there was one bit of advice that was new to me: “Try using a Tangle Teezer”.

I hadn’t heard of a Tangle Teezer and didn’t know what one was but a quick google search lead me to the very informative Amazon.co.uk page on it which showed me it was a special hairbrush, specially designed by a hairdresser called Shaun Pulfrey who presented this brush on the British enterpreneurial program “Dragon’s Den”.

The Tangle Teezer is specially designed to detangle hair in a way that is healthy for the hair. The Amazon site states: “Tangle Teezer Original promises to reform the most hardened of hair criminals, painlessly helping put hair on the road to recovery. ”

After reading a bit about it, and seeing a LOT of positive reviews on Amazon, I decided to purchase a Tangle Teezer (Original) and see for myself. Here’s my review:

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My Tangle Teezer Review

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First impressions

When the brush first arrived, to be honest, I was a bit underwhelmed. My initial impression was that it felt like one of my childhood dolls’ hairbrushes, made of relatively cheap-feeling plastic. The brush’s haphazardly angled teeth are spiky to your fingers-touch and I found it hard to imagine this feeling like a “massage” on your head as some of the Amazon reviews stated. But, I was determined to keep my mind open until I tried it.

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Trying the Tangle Teezer on dry hair

When you work the Tangle Teezer through dry hair, it does glide very easily through it. If it meets a knot or tangle, it seems to sort of gently glide over it. When I first noticed it doing this, I thought it was just gliding over tangles and not working them out but I noticed that it really did work it more loose as it glided. I found myself not having to go over tangles as many times as I normally would with a comb or a normal brush – definitely a good thing. Calling it “miraculous” as some Amazon reviews do, may be going a bit far, but I was pleasantly surprised as to the brush’s efficiency.

When passed on top of the head though, the brush does feel a little bit spikey.

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Trying the Tangle Teezer on wet hair

One of the claimed benefits of the Tangle Teezer is that it is gentle on wet hair which is when hair is most prone to breakage. I tried the Tangle Teezer after washing my hair and found that it did indeed pass through any knots and tangles with great ease – although to be honest, I always find it quite easy with a normal comb too after using a good conditioner.

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Was there less hair breakage?

To be honest, I’m not sure I can tell yet. There were hairs caught up in the brush after using it (both with dry and wet hair) but that doesn’t necessarily indicate breakage – it may simply be natural shedding.

It’s still early days to report on whether there was less hair breakage but I’m looking forward to seeing progress in the coming months of using the Tangle Teezer.

(I wish I had a way to test this product properly, like: have a set of twins to observe; one using a Tangle Teezer and the other using a comb, and examine the results after 1 month or something!)

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UPDATE 10 Days after first use:

Personally, I’m not sure either way if I noticed an increase or decrease in whispies. But the brush is convenient to hold and use – perhaps more so than an ordinary brush.

So will I continue using the Tangle Teezer? I think for dry hair, yes, since it does work as good as, if not better than my normal paddle brush. For wet hair though I think I will stick to my comb since it always did a good job and my gut tells me a wide-toothed comb, handled gently, is gentler on the hair than any brush.

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People in the public eye who use a Tangle Teezer:
Since getting a Tangle Teezer, I’ve noticed where I’ve seen people on TV or youtube using one too. So far the people I’ve spotted using a Tangle Teezer brush include:

• Zoella (youtuber, recommended Tangle Teezer in this video)
• SprinklesofGlitter (youtuber, as seen here)
• ijustine (youtuber – I can’t find the video now but I’m sure I saw her talk about a hot pink Tangle Teezer as one of her favorite new products in one video)
• Luisa Zissman on Celebrity Big Brother 2014, UK

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If you’d like to try the Tangle Teezer yourself, they’re available in lots of shops. Here are the Amazon links to them for you:
– Tangle Teezer on Amazon.com
– Tangle Teezer on Amazon.co.uk