Review — New Aveda “Deep” Conditioner

Ever since Aveda discontinued their much-adored Curessence deep conditioner, they’ve been on my hit list. (That stuff was fabulous, and a cult classic — you don’t go changing/pulling something so beloved by so many! Bad form, Aveda!) But then, they’ve pretty much lost all my respect since selling out to Estée Lauder anyway.

Okay, staying on track. Despite said loss of respect, I’m still on their mailing list, and I still get occasional freebie vouchers for whatever new product they’ve come up with. A couple years ago they came out with an “alternative” to Curessence, i.e. their Damage Remedy shampoo and conditioner.  But that stuff sucked — it wasn’t nearly as moisturizing or penetrating as Curessence was.*

AAAAANYWAY, you probably didn’t come here for a history lesson!  Nope, you came for my review.  So now that I’ve taken you through all that, I’ll try and be brief: the newest stuff sucks.

Yep, they realized that the Damage Remedy duo wasn’t really cutting it compared to days of yore, so came out with a new set called Dry Remedy which included the Dry Remedy Moisturizing Treatment Masque, another new attempt at a deep conditioner (instead of just bringing back Curessence like they friggin’ SHOULD HAVE).  And the new stuff is just as non-deep as Damage Remedy was, but in a crappier way.

It’s a dimethicone-heavy formulation, and it feels fabulous when it first goes on and when you first rinse it out.  But after the hair is dried?  Frizz city.  Let me be more precise: dry, coarse, brittle frizz city, without a pleasant Aveda fragrance.  That’s right, it doesn’t even soften, at least not for me — it only felt nice while my hair was still wet.  And the smell is just nothing to get excited over — toned down compared to their old signature Aveda scents, and much more generic.  (Again, probably a new marketing thing, i.e. alienating the original customer base in an attempt to gain mainstream popularity.  Sayonara, I say.)

Anyway, can you tell I’m bitter?  Aveda was once the kind of company that I’d be willing to move to friggin’ Minnesota to work for.  (And I don’t like the extreme cold, extreme heat, or extreme lack of ocean.)  Now it’s just another faceless corporate BS front, and it really does sadden me.  But in a nutshell: don’t bother with this new product, either!

*You know the worst part of this whole discontinuation of a rockstar product?  I was complaining about this with an Aveda employee who was also a big Curessence fan, and she told me privately that they only pulled the stuff because some dumb Aveda customers were ignoring the directions and using the protein-heavy Curessence weekly treatment as a daily conditioner, and — guess what — they got weighed down by buildup and then complained.  So a handful of idiots ruined it for the rest of us!  And Aveda, King Idiot, took their opinion more seriously than that of all its hardcore Curessence fans! SIGH…