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Have you heard about weDo/ – our newest range of products at The Head Gardener? We, like the products, are proud to support the global effort to go green through use of ethically-sourced, sustainable ingredients that are as friendly to your hair and skin as they are to the environment.

We gave close friend, former BBC presenter and journalist, Pennie Latin, a sample basket of weDo/ products for some feedback. So stay tuned as we take you through through her no-frills review of the new range over the next few weeks. And if anything piques your curiosity, pop by and see us at the salon – which, by the way, has been decked out in lush, leafy foliage in honour of the launch!

Entry #1… Enjoy!

Ok confession time, whisper it, I’m the world’s worst when it comes to hair care or skin care. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s just that I was at the back of the queue when God was handing out the genes for general maintenance. I take low-maintenance to a whole new level. My skin care regime?  Soap and baby oil, maybe a dash of Vaseline intensive care if I’m really pampering myself.  My hair care routine? Cheap as chips shampoo, a squeeze of conditioner, wash, go and quite often forget to look in the mirror before I arrive.  All these Zoom meetings have not been my friend.

You know what’s daft about all this?  I actually love being pampered and I genuinely do enjoy a good product, but I don’t enjoy them enough not to worry about the damage all this consumption and plastic pollution does to the planet.

So, when Alison at the Head Gardener asked me to road test the new Wella WeDo range I thought she was off her nut!

“me?” I blinked, “but I’m rubbish at hair stuff, I won’t even know the right words to describe what the products do!”

“yup, you”, Alison pushed back, “if anyone’s going to be honest about them it’s you, you’ll say it as it is, you won’t pull your punches, you care about the environment and that’s what they’re all about”.

So today a bag arrived with 9 different products for me to try. Cue panic. 9!? I didn’t even know there were 9 things I could apply a product to!  But, as a journalist, I’m nothing if not insatiably curious so here I go, a soapy Calamity Jane heading for the wild west…just tell me which end of the shampoo gun I point and which part of my body to pull the trigger at! 

-Pennie Latin

WeDo …first steps
Sitting on a beach eating ripe slices of sweet pink melon, pressing my bare toes deep into the sand where its cooler – how ridiculously exotic that sounds after the year we’ve had but WeDo shampoo smells of sun and that’s the image that pops into my head when I give it a sniff. I can’t think how else to describe it, a soft, melon freshness hits you as soon as you open the bottle. Apparently it’s grapefruit, lemon and petitgrain (I have absolutely no idea what petitgrain is but can only imagine it stands for little grains of nice smelling stuff). So, it’s to the Med I head when I step into the shower, in spite of it being a day that throws up swirls of spring snow while the daffodils and gorse flowers blink in yellow shock.
I don’t use much and decide to rinse and repeat. So far, so shampoo. It certainly foams less than my usual shampoo but according to the blurb that’s to be expected and makes no difference. I study the 8 remaining bottles and jars with baffled interest. I’ve no real clue what to use next, this is pure guess work. Given I have a mass of fine, curly hair I reach for the detangle spray. I’m slightly wary of detangle sprays, I’ve used them before and the result is often too oily and heavy for my type of hair. WeDo detangle feels light and non-greasy and I only need a few sprays of grapefruity sunshine to then easily run a brush through my hair.
I’m itching to try one more product. The “hair and body oil elixir” sounds slightly intimidating and a nudge too date-night for a Monday and the “spread happiness hair and body mist” sounds way too exciting for the late evening dog walk through the snow I have ahead. I decide I shall save misting my way into a happy place for tomorrow (when, given I’ve a nearly teen daughter with serious home-school lockdown fatigue, I might just order a vat of the stuff, climb on in and close the lid).
Instead, I reach for the moisturising hair and hand cream. Hair AND hand cream? Yup! All these years I’ve been baffled by why one product can’t moisturise more than one bit of you (why on earth do you need foot cream and hand cream and face cream and body moisturiser?). Finally a cream that kills two birds with one pot. How sensible is that, even more so that you put it on your hands, run it through your hair (I’m stabbing wildly in the dark that this is what I’m meant to be doing with it) then just rub it into your hands afterwards. Actually, compared to lots of hand creams, it’s beautifully light and really quickly absorbed. I get incredibly dry hands but instantly they feel smoother and softer. For someone like me who can’t be terribly arsed with using loads of different products – I’m too lazy and let’s probably face it, too tight – I’m totally sold on this idea. It just makes sense. Its all I can do not to rub the remaining cream into my face to see if I can get 3 hits out of it!
I quickly dry my hair with the diffuser to see if I can notice any difference. I promised I’d be honest about this stuff and, if I’m honest, my hair feels soft, clean, fresh and good. Is it softer, cleaner, fresher, better? I’ve no idea but I do smell bloody lovely!
The verdict on the shampoo, detangle and hair–hand combo cream? There is no compromise on quality here. They are great products which make you feel and look good but even better is the fact that I know they are kinder to the planet so I feel good about using them.
The environmental side of this matters to me, a lot, and I’m seduced by the idea that for every bottle of sulphate-free, silicone-free WeDo product, Wella says 8 plastic bottles are removed from the environment (they’ve partnered with plasticbank though I’d like to dig down into that and learn more). It feels like a big hit for a simple action on my part. All the packaging is 100% recyclable too and, given how much time I spend standing over the bin sighing loudly about the amount of plastics that are still not recycled yet seem to endlessly find themselves wrapped around the daily products we use, this also appeals.
The real question I’m left with is, if Wella can create a range that is as good if not better than more conventional hair and body products, don’t harm the environment and actually help try to challenge the problem of plastic – why isn’t everyone else doing it too?!
Will I use them in future? Yes, I think I will and, for the record, several hours later and my hands are still soft and still smell like I’ve been slicing grapefruit for that holiday G&T!

Night shift
It’s no good, I’m none the wiser. After staring hard at the pot of WeDo nourishing overnight hair cream for several minutes I’ve still not got the faintest clue what it’s for or how I should apply it. There are no clues printed on the 100% recyclable pot either (although I do learn that the contents are vegan). I can only suppose I was off the day they taught this at school.
I open it up and give the white creamy contents an investigative prod with my finger tip. The texture is difficult to describe, it’s not a gloupy, creamy cream, more like a slightly fluffy sorbet but without the stickiness. The smell is enticingly fruity but I still can’t picture how I can rub it into my hair without my hair then rubbing it into my rather nice linen pillow case. Maybe I need one of those plastic shower caps but, given WeDo is all about less plastic not more, I suspect not (and I’m not massively seduced by the idea of crinkling and crackling all night).
In the end I get an old towel and put it over my pillow, then rub a little of the cream through the ends of my hair, still suspicious that I’m missing a vital clue as to what I should actually be doing. Finally, I give in and while I carefully lie down with my freshly creamed hair, I Google an answer (yes, yes, I know I could have done this at the start but I’m one of those people who builds an Ikea wardrobe on guess work alone, I’m a working things out kind of woman!)
“Apply in the evening on lengths and ends of dry or slightly damp hair and leave in overnight.
For fine to normal hair types, rinse out in the morning.
For coarse or curly hair types, use less product but don’t rinse out.”

I have fine and curly hair. To rinse or not to rinse, this is the question. I decide to worry about it in the morning when, as it happens, the decision is taken out of my hands by the vision that greets me in the mirror. I’ve been transformed into a female Worzel Gummage with tufts of mad hair sticking out in all directions like a cross between a fright-wig and a dandelion clock. I rinse.
I suspect that overnight cream was just not designed for me, my pillows or my kind of hair. The improvement in condition would have to be staggering for me to go to the trouble of using it, which doesn’t mean it isn’t good, in the right hands it maybe miraculous, it just means it’s a faff too far for a woman who finds looking in the mirror at all a bit of unnecessary distraction in a busy day.

weDO natural oil: hair and body oil elixir
weDO hair and body elixir is another one of the Wella weDO range which needs you to improvise because it doesn’t come with instructions. I’m starting to suspect my desire for a howTO on every pot of weDO is an age thing ie if I don’t know what to do with it then perhaps I’m too old to be playing with it? Instead of googling the recommended use I google the definition of ‘elixir’ because the word snags me – in a good way – and I like being snagged by chewy words and elixir is a word which conjures up dragons and unicorns, fairy princesses and frogs you get to snog into princes. Under ‘elixir’ the dictionary says, “a magical or medicinal potion”, I rest my case. Who wouldn’t want to anoint themselves with a magical potion? Because one thing’s for sure, the word ‘elixir’ could never take you somewhere bad, it could take you somewhere naughty but definitely only with nice on the side, turns out it can also take you somewhere pretty oily!
One of my absolutely favourite things about the weDO range is this business of getting extra bang for your buck by doubling up on the things you can apply the products to, in this case the hair and the body, as a result, the first time I try the hair & body oil elixir I get slightly carried away. I end up smelling glorious from head to toe but the oil, while feeling light and quickly absorbed by my skin, seems really heavy on my hair. I look like I’ve been dipping my head in salad dressing, so much so I have to wash it again. The next time I try it I’m much less generous and just use a teeny amount on the ends of my hair which worked much better.
Overall, I think because I’ve got quite fine hair which wilts under too much of any kind of product, I’m slightly nervous of how rich this oil is. I like using it as a body moisturiser, but I suspect it would work much better on a different hair type to mine.

weDO Spread Happiness
If the weDO hair and body elixir comes from the land of naughty unicorns then weDO ‘spread happiness’ surely must be the fairy dusting on the cake. I start with a tentative skoosh onto my wrist and give it a sniff. Like all the weDO range I’ve tried, it has a light, fruity, sun-kissed kind of smell. I can’t put my finger on why, but all the products smell like warm skin on a summer’s day feels. You know that feeling when you’re lying in the sun and you’re beautifully warm and relaxed then you reach over and someone has just put a high ball packed with ice and your favourite tipple down beside you. I realise that really doesn’t make sense and something can’t really smell a feel, but this does. Wella have managed to capture a feeling and squeeze it into a bottle and I can’t fail but be rather impressed. I’m not usually one for using body spray but I like that Spread Happiness is much less cloying and overwhelming than many other similar products. I also like that it smells like the rest of the range so its almost like you’re topping up on that just out of the shower feel everytime you use it. I didn’t think I would, but I’ve actually been happily skooshing myself in Spread Happiness all this week. I’ve no idea if that’s why the sun has shone quite so brightly, the sky has miraculously turned azure blue and I’ve had so much skip in my step the Spring lambs are doing a double take. Maybe its coincidence or maybe Wella really have tapped a secret source of Fairy Dust, but so long as it keeps the sun shining, I’m going to keep skooshing for Scotland (and smelling great!).