Shaklee ProSanté Hair Care Reviewed: What Your Shampoo Is Actually Doing

Carl and Suzanne LaFlamme are Shaklee Ambassadors at All’s Well Health. Note: this post contains our product recommendations and links, so we may earn a commission on purchases but at no extra cost to you.

I’m sixty-eight years old and I still have all my hair. It’s going the color of a January sky, but it’s all there, and I’ve been using Shaklee’s ProSanté hair care since the line launched in 2002. The Nourishing Scalp Treatment once or twice a week, and the shampoo and conditioner along with it.

Is ProSanté the reason for my fabulous head of hair? Don’t know and so if you came here looking for the shampoo that regrows hair, you might be disappointed. But if you stick around you’ll find a lot of good information on what a good shampoo can honestly do for your hair.

First, the part most articles skip

The leading causes of thinning hair are hormones, genetics, and age. Not your shampoo.

No shampoo changes any of those three. Any product promising otherwise is either selling you something or has stopped reading its own label. According to the American Hair Loss Association, women make up forty percent of American hair loss sufferers. For men it starts earlier: two thirds have noticeable loss by thirty-five, and roughly eighty-five percent have significantly thinning hair by fifty. This is ordinary human biology, widely shared, and not a personal failing.

So why write about shampoo at all?

Because a shampoo can make a difference in the quality of your scalp and hair, especially over time. Even at twice a week that’s over a hundred washes a year, and plenty of people wash daily.

What a shampoo can honestly do

Shaklee’s own explanation of the mechanism is the clearest one I’ve read.

A healthy hair follicle cycles between an active growing phase and a resting phase. That’s normal and it’s supposed to happen. But sustained stress on the scalp can shorten the active phase and push more follicles into an extended rest. Chemical processing, heat styling, UV exposure, pollutants, and yes, poor nutrition. Do that for long enough and the result isn’t dramatic loss. It’s a slow drift toward finer, weaker, less manageable hair. Less hair quality, not less hair count.

That drift is the part a shampoo touches. Scalp condition, breakage during washing and combing, buildup, and the cumulative effect of what you apply daily for years.

That’s a short list. It’s also an honest one, and it happens to be the thing most people actually notice in the mirror.

Worth noting: your nutrition plays a part on that stress list. If you have never looked at whether your diet is covering the basics, that’s a more fundamental question than which bottle is in your shower. Personalized nutrition is where we usually start that conversation.

What’s actually in the bottle you own right now

Turn it around and read the back. Not to frighten yourself. Most of what’s on there is fine, and a long chemical name isn’t the same as a bad ingredient. Everything is a chemical. Water is a chemical.

But a handful of ingredients are worth knowing by name, because they’re common, they’re there for the manufacturer’s convenience rather than your hair’s benefit, and there are alternatives.

Sodium lauryl sulfate and sodium laureth sulfate (SLS, SLES). These are the detergents that make a shampoo foam impressively. They also strip oils efficiently, which is great on a frying pan and less great on a scalp trying to maintain its own moisture balance. If your hair feels squeaky and then straw-like after washing, this is usually why.

Cocamide DEA and lauramide DEA. Foam boosters and thickeners. Their function is the texture of the product in your hand, not the condition of your hair.

The preservatives worth knowing by name

Quaternium-15. A preservative that works by slowly releasing formaldehyde to extend shelf life. It’s legal and permitted, whatever you may have read, including in an earlier version of this page. It has not been banned. It’s a known skin sensitizer, and a formaldehyde-releasing preservative is a reasonable thing to avoid on skin you’re washing several times a week for decades.

Formaldehyde-donor preservatives generally. Imidazolidinyl urea and diazolidinyl urea are the two you will see most often. Same category, same reasoning.

Propylene glycol. A humectant and solvent. Common, well-studied, and a frequent irritant for people with sensitive scalps.

None of these will hurt you tomorrow. That’s not the argument. The argument is that when something has a decades-long cumulative relationship with your scalp, it’s worth choosing deliberately instead of by accident.

Swap this for that

Shaklee shampoo: what ProSanté leaves out, and what it puts in

Here’s why we recommend Shaklee’s ProSanté.

Every item on that swap list above is something Shaklee states ProSanté doesn’t contain. No SLS or SLES. No cocamide or lauramide DEA. No Quaternium-15. No formaldehyde-donor preservatives. No propylene glycol. No occlusive oils, no colors, no dyes. It’s pH balanced and dermatologist tested.

I find that more persuasive than any performance claim, because an exclusion list is checkable. You can read it, and you can read your current bottle, and you can see the difference for yourself without taking anybody’s word for it.

Revitalizing Shampoo is the place to start if you’re only changing one thing. It’s mild, meant for all hair types and aimed particularly at dry or damaged hair, and the whole point of it is to clean without stripping your hair’s own pH and moisture balance. It’s not going to give you the dramatic lather you may be used to. That’s the sulfates being absent, not the shampoo underperforming. Foam is theater. It was never the part doing the cleaning.

There are over a hundred customer reviews on the shampoo’s product page. I’d rather you read those than take my word for the experience of using it.

Conditioner has a different job

Shampoo works on your scalp. Conditioner works on the strand, and the difference matters more than most people are told.

Every hair on your head has a cuticle, a layer of overlapping scales on the outside. Heat, color, chlorine and plain mechanical friction lift and chip those scales. Dull, frizzy, snaps-when-you-comb-it hair is mostly that: a roughed-up surface.

Laying the cuticle back down is the conditioner’s whole assignment. Less friction means less breakage, and most breakage happens while you’re dragging a comb through wet hair.

Replenishing Conditioner is the one I’d add second, especially for longer, color-treated or heat-styled hair, where most of the visible damage is on the outside of the strand. It uses nature-based protein and humectants to smooth surface damage and mend split ends.

Everyone talks about hair, but it starts with the health of your scalp

Your scalp is skin. It’s the only skin most people wash with detergent, blast with hot air, and then never think about again. You wouldn’t do that to your face.

Two things tend to go wrong down there. Your scalp gets too oily, and the microorganisms that live there feed on that oil and shed byproducts that irritate the follicle until it clogs. Or it goes too dry, which itches, and scratching does its own damage.

For the record, losing fifty to a hundred hairs a day is normal out of roughly a hundred thousand. Finding hair in the drain isn’t the problem. What’s replacing it is. And no, nobody expects you to count.

What ProSanté puts in is a blend Shaklee calls the Scalp Health Complex. It’s ten vitamins, minerals and botanicals, formulated to support the scalp rather than coat the hair. The pieces I find most interesting:

• Swertia and ginseng, which Shaklee includes to support circulation at the follicle
• Panthenol, for strength, softness and shine. It’s the one ingredient on this list you have probably seen advertised
• Tea tree leaf oil, to support the scalp’s own ability to keep follicles clear
• Superoxide dismutase and green tea extract, as antioxidants
• Zinc PCA, vitamin B6 and saw palmetto, which address the appearance of oiliness and flaking

That last one is a genuine curiosity. Saw palmetto usually turns up in conversations about prostate health rather than shampoo, and it’s here for its effect on sebum production.

Nourishing Scalp Treatment is the odd one out. It works on the scalp rather than the hair, and you use it a couple of times a week rather than daily. If your issue reads more like scalp than hair, flaking, tightness, general irritation, this is the one I’d try first rather than last.

What to expect, and when

Hair grows about half an inch a month. Whatever you change today, you’re looking at thirty to ninety days before there’s enough new growth and enough reduced breakage to see a difference. The first thing most people notice isn’t thickness but how their hair behaves. Less frizz, less snapping when they comb it wet.

And the honest condition on all of it: results come from using it consistently, as a routine, not from a bottle that lives under the sink. That’s just how topical products work.

When it’s not a shampoo problem

If your hair is coming out in patches, if it started suddenly, if it followed a medication change, an illness, a pregnancy, or a period of significant stress, or if your scalp is genuinely painful rather than just dry, that’s a doctor’s question and not a shopping question. Thyroid conditions and iron deficiency both show up in hair, and both are straightforward to test for and treat. No shampoo on earth is the right answer to any of that, and a good dermatologist will get you further than we can.

Where we land

ProSanté isn’t going to regrow your hair, and anybody who tells you a shampoo will isn’t worth listening to. What it is, is a well-formulated product that leaves out a specific list of ingredients I’d rather not put on my scalp every time I wash my hair for the rest of my life, and puts in a few ingredients I’m glad are there.

I’ve been using all three for twenty-four years, and I’m not planning to stop.

If you have a question about your own hair or scalp, reply to this or give Suzanne a call. It’s the part of this we enjoy most.

Carl & Suzanne LaFlamme
Independent Shaklee Ambassadors · All’s Well Health

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.