Does This Hair Density Line Actually Work? Under Your Skin Review
So naturally, when I was first introduced to Under Your Skin, a Swedish clean beauty brand that makes hair care that focuses on the scalp, I gravitated towards their Density Collection. Could it actually help with faster, thicker hair growth? Would it eliminate that horrible clump of hair that comes out every time I shower? Could I potentially grow some new baby hairs to fill in some thinner spots on my scalp? Cosmo Commerce Director Rachel Torgerson and I tested out their full range of density-boosting products, and we have the full scoop for you below!
I was slightly skeptical of the Density Shampoo before I began using it. How much would a product that's applied and rinsed off within five minutes actually do? But then again, I've used shampoos that have caused literal hair fallout, so I'll take anything that's formulated to prevent that. And while no shampoo can single-handedly fix the root cause of hair loss, shampoos can definitely help reduce breakage and nourish the scalp.
This one was formulated specifically to moisturize the scalp, stimulate hair follicles, and create an environment where healthy new hair can grow. Ingredients like Capilia Longa, an extract derived from turmeric, to improve hair density and thickness, as well as lactic acid (which helps moisturize the scalp) can encourage growth, so we love to see that in Under Your Skin's ingredient list.
The product itself felt really nice and sudsy. I got a great lather especially on the second shampoo if you're a twice-as-nice, double shampoo girlie like I am. It was fairly easy to work through my hair (which means I didn't tangle up or rip out any strands trying to get every strand soaped up) and I didn't feel like the product stripped my hair at all, even though I shampooed twice.
As for the Density Conditioner, I applied a big gob throughout my hair and let it sit for five minutes while I completed the rest of my shower routine. I've always lived by the no-conditioner-on-your-scalp rule to avoid weighing down my hair, so out of the density products I've been testing, this one is probably the least likely to provide a noticeable increase in hair growth and density.
As for the density claims, Torgerson noted that her hair definitely feels stronger than it did before she started using this shampoo and conditioner. But full disclaimer—she thinks this is more due to the density drops by the same brand (more on that below!) than because of the shampoo, simply because the key ingredients wash out with the in-shower products but can be fully absorbed into the scalp via the drops. "That being said, I'm sure it's only helping and not hurting that situation," she said. "All in all, I like these and would keep them in my rotating list of options!"
I've tried many a hair density serum that's left my scalp feeling like it's covered in oil. I've even covered my scalp in rosemary oil in pursuit of thicker hair. Neither are fun, so I loved that these drops are light as water. During my testing period, I used the product all over but focused on my temples and natural part where I see the most thinning. It's extremely easy to use—it can be applied on wet or dry hair, thank goodness—and doesn't leave any greasy residue, making it easy to actually be consistent with these.
Torgerson noticed a major difference in her hair after using the Density Drops for only two weeks. "After giving birth, I've definitely noticed a thinner ponytail. That, paired with an FYP on TikTok that for some reason features a lot of women worried about this issue has turned me paranoid about losing hair and wanting to bulk mine back up. After two weeks, I'm noticing less hair come out in my hairbrush and in my shower routine. It also feels stronger, and it seems like I have new baby hair growth at my temples/throughout," she noted.
"I love that this isn't an oil-based serum," she continued. "I can apply these morning and night without the fear that I'll have to slick my hair back in a bun for the day or show up with oily hair to work. Quite the opposite, I swear this refreshes my scalp so I don't need to reach for dry shampoo as often and am not desperate for my shower days in the same way I was in the past! I want to keep going for the full results, but definitely excited about what's already happened."
Okay, this one is a new favorite for sure. I've been trying to reduce the number of aerosols in my life (hairspray and dry shampoo were the last two to go) so I jumped on the opportunity to test this non-aerosol powder dry shampoo. Shockingly, the white powder didn't make me look like I was prematurely greying even though I have very dark hair, and I brought it on a bachelorette trip where all the girls kept borrowing it and using it throughout the weekend. One even took a photo of the bottle so she could purchase one for herself.
Torgerson also tested out this dry shampoo and landed on the same verdict—it's seriously volumizing and 100% brunette-approved. "I have stayed away from powder dry shampoos because, as a brunette, they always seem to leave a white cast over my hair that at best fades to make it appear duller and at worst, looks full-on like I've simply tried to blend flour into my roots. This one is so different," she raved.
"It pumps on in a satisfying plume, which spreads the powder nice and even, and then disappears entirely after a gentle massage and brush through. Like seriously—gone! I'm really impressed," said Torgerson. "It's also small enough to fit in my travel toiletry case, yet is supposed to last for months and months. Beyond that, it definitely delivered on the overall promise to reduce the look of oil and give a bit more lift and body. I'm sold!"
It's a yes, yes, yes from me! Knowing that the products I'm using definitely won't trigger any hair fallout and will actually strengthen my strands, reduce shower shedding, and lead to the growth of new baby hairs is exactly what I'm looking for in a haircare line. The three-part density system makes it easy to be consistent, which is really the most important part (historically tricky for me, personally) and I'm looking forward to seeing even more results as I keep using these products!
Hannah is the Shopping Editor at Cosmopolitan, covering all things from chic home decor to trendy fashion finds, TikTok products that are actually worth your $$$, and the perfect gift to buy for your boyfriend's mom. She previously wrote for Seventeen and CR Fashion Book. Follow her on Instagram for hot takes on red carpet fashion and pictures of her office outfits that nobody asked for.
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6 hours ago
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Planned C-Sections Linked to Higher Risk of Cancer in Children
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Cosmopolitan
3 days ago
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Does This Hair Density Line Actually Work? Under Your Skin Review
I went through a semi-traumatic period of unexplained hair loss and shedding my freshman year of college, and even though it's since been resolved, I still feel like it never quite bounced back to the way it was. And although I admittedly have a decent amount of hair, I could always use more, especially in certain spots. I have some thinning hair around my temples—think the area of your scalp that your hands run over when you're gathering your hair into a ponytail—as well as on my natural part line. So naturally, when I was first introduced to Under Your Skin, a Swedish clean beauty brand that makes hair care that focuses on the scalp, I gravitated towards their Density Collection. Could it actually help with faster, thicker hair growth? Would it eliminate that horrible clump of hair that comes out every time I shower? Could I potentially grow some new baby hairs to fill in some thinner spots on my scalp? Cosmo Commerce Director Rachel Torgerson and I tested out their full range of density-boosting products, and we have the full scoop for you below! I was slightly skeptical of the Density Shampoo before I began using it. How much would a product that's applied and rinsed off within five minutes actually do? But then again, I've used shampoos that have caused literal hair fallout, so I'll take anything that's formulated to prevent that. And while no shampoo can single-handedly fix the root cause of hair loss, shampoos can definitely help reduce breakage and nourish the scalp. This one was formulated specifically to moisturize the scalp, stimulate hair follicles, and create an environment where healthy new hair can grow. Ingredients like Capilia Longa, an extract derived from turmeric, to improve hair density and thickness, as well as lactic acid (which helps moisturize the scalp) can encourage growth, so we love to see that in Under Your Skin's ingredient list. The product itself felt really nice and sudsy. I got a great lather especially on the second shampoo if you're a twice-as-nice, double shampoo girlie like I am. It was fairly easy to work through my hair (which means I didn't tangle up or rip out any strands trying to get every strand soaped up) and I didn't feel like the product stripped my hair at all, even though I shampooed twice. As for the Density Conditioner, I applied a big gob throughout my hair and let it sit for five minutes while I completed the rest of my shower routine. I've always lived by the no-conditioner-on-your-scalp rule to avoid weighing down my hair, so out of the density products I've been testing, this one is probably the least likely to provide a noticeable increase in hair growth and density. As for the density claims, Torgerson noted that her hair definitely feels stronger than it did before she started using this shampoo and conditioner. But full disclaimer—she thinks this is more due to the density drops by the same brand (more on that below!) than because of the shampoo, simply because the key ingredients wash out with the in-shower products but can be fully absorbed into the scalp via the drops. "That being said, I'm sure it's only helping and not hurting that situation," she said. "All in all, I like these and would keep them in my rotating list of options!" I've tried many a hair density serum that's left my scalp feeling like it's covered in oil. I've even covered my scalp in rosemary oil in pursuit of thicker hair. Neither are fun, so I loved that these drops are light as water. During my testing period, I used the product all over but focused on my temples and natural part where I see the most thinning. It's extremely easy to use—it can be applied on wet or dry hair, thank goodness—and doesn't leave any greasy residue, making it easy to actually be consistent with these. Torgerson noticed a major difference in her hair after using the Density Drops for only two weeks. "After giving birth, I've definitely noticed a thinner ponytail. That, paired with an FYP on TikTok that for some reason features a lot of women worried about this issue has turned me paranoid about losing hair and wanting to bulk mine back up. After two weeks, I'm noticing less hair come out in my hairbrush and in my shower routine. It also feels stronger, and it seems like I have new baby hair growth at my temples/throughout," she noted. "I love that this isn't an oil-based serum," she continued. "I can apply these morning and night without the fear that I'll have to slick my hair back in a bun for the day or show up with oily hair to work. Quite the opposite, I swear this refreshes my scalp so I don't need to reach for dry shampoo as often and am not desperate for my shower days in the same way I was in the past! I want to keep going for the full results, but definitely excited about what's already happened." Okay, this one is a new favorite for sure. I've been trying to reduce the number of aerosols in my life (hairspray and dry shampoo were the last two to go) so I jumped on the opportunity to test this non-aerosol powder dry shampoo. Shockingly, the white powder didn't make me look like I was prematurely greying even though I have very dark hair, and I brought it on a bachelorette trip where all the girls kept borrowing it and using it throughout the weekend. One even took a photo of the bottle so she could purchase one for herself. Torgerson also tested out this dry shampoo and landed on the same verdict—it's seriously volumizing and 100% brunette-approved. "I have stayed away from powder dry shampoos because, as a brunette, they always seem to leave a white cast over my hair that at best fades to make it appear duller and at worst, looks full-on like I've simply tried to blend flour into my roots. This one is so different," she raved. "It pumps on in a satisfying plume, which spreads the powder nice and even, and then disappears entirely after a gentle massage and brush through. Like seriously—gone! I'm really impressed," said Torgerson. "It's also small enough to fit in my travel toiletry case, yet is supposed to last for months and months. Beyond that, it definitely delivered on the overall promise to reduce the look of oil and give a bit more lift and body. I'm sold!" It's a yes, yes, yes from me! Knowing that the products I'm using definitely won't trigger any hair fallout and will actually strengthen my strands, reduce shower shedding, and lead to the growth of new baby hairs is exactly what I'm looking for in a haircare line. The three-part density system makes it easy to be consistent, which is really the most important part (historically tricky for me, personally) and I'm looking forward to seeing even more results as I keep using these products! Hannah is the Shopping Editor at Cosmopolitan, covering all things from chic home decor to trendy fashion finds, TikTok products that are actually worth your $$$, and the perfect gift to buy for your boyfriend's mom. She previously wrote for Seventeen and CR Fashion Book. Follow her on Instagram for hot takes on red carpet fashion and pictures of her office outfits that nobody asked for.
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6 days ago
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The past three weeks have been auspicious for the anti-vaxxers. On June 9, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. purged the nation's most important panel of vaccine experts: All 17 voting members of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which sets recommendations for the use of vaccines and determines which ones must be covered through insurance and provided free of charge to children on Medicaid, were abruptly fired. The small, ragtag crew of replacements that Kennedy appointed two days later met this week for the first time, amid lots of empty chairs in a conference room in Atlanta. They had come to talk about the safety of vaccines: to raise concerns about the data, to float hypotheses of harm, to issue findings. The resulting spectacle was set against a backdrop of accelerating action from the secretary. On Wednesday, Kennedy terminated more than $1 billion in U.S. funding for Gavi, a global-health initiative that supports the vaccination of more than 65 million children every year. Lyn Redwood, a nurse practitioner and the former president of Children's Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization that Kennedy used to chair, was just hired as a special government employee. (She presented at the ACIP meeting yesterday.) A recently posted scientific document on the ACIP website that underscored the safety of thimerosal, an ingredient in a small proportion of the nation's flu vaccines, had been taken down, a committee member said, because the document 'was not authorized by the office of the secretary.' (A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services told me in an email that this document was provided to the ACIP members in their meeting briefing packets.) What's clear enough is that, 61 years after ACIP's founding, America's vaccination policy is about to be recooked. Now we've had a glimpse inside the kitchen. The meeting started with complaints. 'Some media outlets have been very harsh on the new members of this committee,' said Martin Kulldorff, a rangy Swedish biostatistician and noted COVID contrarian who is now ACIP's chair. (Kuldorff was one of the lead authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a controversial proposal from the fall of 2020 to isolate seniors and other vulnerable people while reopening the rest of society.) In suggesting that he and Kennedy's other appointees are opposed to vaccination, Kulldorff said, journalists were misleading the public, weakening trust in public health, and fanning 'the flames of vaccine hesitancy.' This was, in fact, the most pugnacious comment of the two-day meeting, which otherwise unfolded in a tone of fearmongering gentility. Robert Malone, a doctor and an infectious-diseases researcher who has embraced the 'anti-vaccine' label and published a conspiracy-theory-laden book that details government psyops against the American people, was unfailingly polite in his frequent intimations about the safety of vaccines, often thanking CDC staff for their hard work and lucid presentations. With his thick white beard, calm affect, and soldierly diction—Malone ended many of his comments by saying, 'Over' into the microphone—he presented less as a firebrand than as, say, the commanding officer of a submarine. When Malone alluded to the worry, for example, that spike proteins from the mRNA-based COVID vaccines linger in the body following injection, he did so in respectful, even deferential, language, suggesting that the public would benefit from greater study of possible 'delayed effects' of immune-system activation. The CDC's traditional approach—its 'world-leading, rigorous' one, he clarified—might be improved by examining this question. A subject-matter expert responded that the CDC has been keeping tabs on real-world safety data on those vaccines for nearly five years, and has not detected any signs of long-term harm. Later, Malone implied that COVID or its treatments might have, through some unspecified, bank-shot mechanism, left the U.S. population more susceptible to other illnesses. There was a 'paradoxical, sudden decrease' in flu cases in 2020 and 2021, he noted, followed by a trend of worsening harm. A CDC staffer pointed out that the decrease in flu during those years was not, in fact, a paradox; well-documented shifts in people's health behavior had temporarily reduced the load of many respiratory illnesses during that same period. But Malone pressed on: 'Some members of the scientific community have concern that they're coming out of the COVID pandemic—exposure to the virus, exposure to various countermeasures—there may be a pattern of broad-based, uh, energy,' he said, his eyes darting up for a moment as he said the word, 'that might contribute to increased severity of influenza disease.' He encouraged the agency to 'be sensitive to that hypothesis.' Throughout these and other questions from the committee members, the CDC's subject-matter experts did their best to explain their work and respond to scattershot technical and conceptual concerns. 'The CDC staff is still attempting to operate as an evidence-based organization,' Laura Morris, a professor at the University of Missouri School of Medicine, who has attended dozens of ACIP meetings in the past and attended this one as a nonvoting liaison to the committee from the American Academy of Family Physicians, told me. 'There was some tension in terms of the capacity of the committee to ask and understand the appropriate methodological questions. The CDC was trying to hold it down.' That task became more difficult as the meeting progressed. 'The new ACIP is an independent body composed of experienced medical and public health experts who evaluate evidence, ask hard questions, and make decisions based on scientific integrity,' the HHS spokesperson told me. 'Bottom line: this process reflects open scientific inquiry and robust debate, not a pre-scripted narrative.' The most vocal questioner among the new recruits—and the one who seemed least beholden to a script—was the MIT business-school professor Retsef Levi, a lesser-known committee appointee who sat across the table from Malone. A scruffy former Israel Defense Forces intelligence officer with a ponytail that reached halfway down his back, Levi's academic background is in data modeling, risk management, and organizational logistics. He approached the proceedings with a swaggering incredulity, challenging the staffers' efforts and pointing out the risks of systematic errors in their thinking. (In a pinned post on his X profile, Levi writes that 'the evidence is mounting and indisputable that mRNA vaccines cause serious harm including death'—a position entirely at odds with copious data presented at the meeting.) Shortly before the committee's vote to recommend a new, FDA-approved monoclonal antibody for preventing RSV in infants, Levi noted that he'd spent some time reviewing the relevant clinical-trial data for the drug and another like it, and found some worrying patterns in the statistics surrounding infant deaths. 'Should we not be concerned that maybe there are some potential safety signals?' he asked. But these very data had already been reviewed, at great length, in multiple settings: by the FDA, in the course of drug approval, and by the dozens of members of ACIP's relevant work group for RSV, which had, per the committee's standard practice, conducted its own staged analysis of the new treatment before the meeting and reached consensus that its benefits outweighed its risks. Levi was uncowed by any reference to this prior work. 'I'm a scientist, but I'm also a father of six kids,' he told the group; speaking as a father, he said, he personally would be concerned about the risk of harm from this new antibody for RSV. In the end, Levi voted against recommending the antibody, as did Vicky Pebsworth, who is on the board of an anti-vaccine organization and holds a Ph.D. in public health and nursing. The five other members voted yes. That 5–2 vote aside, the most contentious issue on the meeting's schedule concerned the flu shots in America that contain thimerosal, which has been an obsession of the anti-vaccine movement for the past few decades. Despite extensive study, vaccines with thimerosal have not been found to be associated with any known harm in human patients, yet an unspecified vote regarding their use was slipped into the meeting's agenda in the absence of any work-group study or presentation from the CDC's staff scientists. What facts there were came almost exclusively from Redwood, the nurse who used to run Kennedy's anti-vaccine organization. Earlier this week, Reuters reported that at least one citation from her posted slides had been invented. That reference was removed before she spoke yesterday. (HHS did not address a request for comment on this issue in its response to me.) The only one of Kennedy's appointees who had ever previously served on the committee—the pediatrician Cody Meissner—seemed perplexed, even pained, by the proceedings. 'I'm not quite sure how to respond to this presentation,' he said when Redwood finished. He went on to sum up his concerns: 'ACIP makes recommendations based on scientific evidence as much as possible. And there is no scientific evidence that thimerosal has caused a problem.' Alas, Meissner's warnings were for nought. Throughout the meeting, he came off as the committee's last remaining, classic 'expert'—a vaccine scientist clinging to ACIP's old ways—but his frequent protestations were often bulldozed over or ignored. In the end, his was the only vote against the resolutions on thimerosal. Throughout the two-day meeting, Kuldorff kept returning to a favorite phrase: evidence-based medicine. 'Secretary Kennedy has given this committee a clear mandate to use evidence-based medicine,' he said on Wednesday morning; 'The purpose of this committee is to follow evidence-based medicine,' he said on Wednesday afternoon; 'What is important is using evidence-based medicine,' he said again when the meeting reached its end. All told, I heard him say evidence-based at least 10 times during the meeting. (To be fair, critics of Kuldorff and his colleagues also love this phrase.) But the committee was erratic in its posture toward the evidence from the very start; it cast doubt on CDC analyses and substituted lay advice and intuition for ACIP's normal methods of assessing and producing expert consensus. 'Decisons were made based on feelings and preferences rather than evidence,' Morris told me after the meeting. 'That's a dangerous way to make public-health policy.'
