Redken has been around for years, and people often speak very highly of the brand. However, my experience with the Redken Rewind was a total bust, despite many other people claiming they love it. Either I’m missing something, or I just don’t get it. The purpose of Redken Rewind (I think the “06” refers to the strength of the hold) is to twist and style hair into basically whatever you want. It’s called “rewind” because once the stuff is in there you can redo your hair into something totally different. The real question is: why would anyone want that? What’s the point of using anything at all if your hair never “sets” into a style?
As usual, I start with looking at the ingredients. Right away, I see that there is nothing natural about this product. The first ingredient is water (as is usually the case), but after that it goes downhill quickly: butylene glycol (brother to the carcinogenic ethylene glycol, this can be irritating to sensitive skin), PEG-100 Stearate (repeated use over long periods is linked to cancer), Linalool (a fragrance banned in the EU, and is harmful to immune systems), and the disliked term “fragrance” which can cover literally thousands of chemical combinations that aren’t required to get disclosed. There are other bad ingredients, but you get the point. Limited use for a bit won’t harm you, but the concern here is with decades of use and exposure to these chemicals.
The smell is awful, and it stays with you all day. It smells like strong soap, and because the paste is a freak of nature it will overpower anything you use as a cologne or aftershave–and that’s a bad thing. Expect to smell like unnatural amounts of soap.
The actual use isn’t even that great, but that might be because I’m not spiking my hair like all the go-hards. It utterly fails the “basketball test” (3 hours of full-court basketball) without question. If you sweat a lot or get rained on, your hair will drip chemical water which smells…you guessed it…like unnatural amounts of soap.
Overall, I give the Redken Rewind a huge pass. The chemicals involved in its makeup are questionable at best, it’s really only useful for guys who do their hair to make it look like they didn’t do their hair, and there are plenty of other products out there which are better for the cost. Redken is probably selling their name here, rather than a quality product.
