Where to Find Coconut Free Products?

My Sensitive Skincare Show Podcast #3

If you suffer from a coconut allergy, it can be a rude awakening to discover that almost ALL skincare products contain some kind of coconut or coconut derivative ingredients. 

Some product lines that advertise themselves as coconut free contain other ingredients such as parabens or fragrances that can be irritating or allergy producing for people with sensitive skin. 

Resources Mentioned

My reader was asking about whether the nontoxic hypoallergenic skin and hair care products that I recommend contain coconut derivatives.

I've been researching this challenge for a while and I wrote a little more about this, and several readers chimed in on our discussion forums to share their coconut free product recommendations.

Prefer to Read?  Here's the Transcript

Hello everyone. Thank you again for joining me in the My Sensitive Skin Care Show.  Today's question is from Melinda. So I’ll let her speak here and then I’ll come back and and answer.

QUESTION: Hi, my name is Melinda and I am also allergic to coconut and coconut oil, so is this product still going to work for me?  Thank you.

ANSWER: Thank you so much Melinda. This is an excellent question and you know, I do get this question quite frequently because coconut allergy is actually not as common as some of the other allergies.

Also it's not as simple as it looks to find coconut-free products because there’s a huge list of coconut derivative ingredients.  If you do a search on the internet you find a big long list of all these ingredients that don't say anything about coconut, but they do contain coconut derivatives.  If you are sensitive to coconut and allergic, you will break out.

So Melinda that's an excellent question and unfortunately the brand that I recommend for so many allergies which is Cleure does have coconut derivatives in some of their products.  They use, I think it's called caprylyl glycol. Actually, I’m not very good at pronouncing these words, but in their ingredients list I see some of their products do have coconut derivatives, not all of them. You can certainly look at their individual ingredients, but they wouldn't be the first choice for coconut-free products.

So I have done some searching on the internet and I found three product lines that looked good, but again you have to check yourself and also you may want to actually contact those companies just to make sure.

So the first one that I found is called Dakota-free Products, very nice website, a small family-owned company, they have a lot of gluten-free and fragrance-free products and they disclose all of their ingredients.   So you can do a web search for Dakota-free products and it might even be dakotafreeproducts.com, I’m not sure. So they looked good.

And then there's another company also called Chagrin Valley Soap & Salve and this company also looks like a small family-owned company with a whole selection of coconut-free products.

They do encourage you when you when you visit their site to make sure that you check the ingredients list because they do update their products periodically. That’s  Chagrin Valley Soap & Salve and again you can do a web search for them.

Just an aside, there are some other coconut-free products out there but they contain ingredients I personally wouldn’t use. You know some of the chemicals that I think are more toxic or you know sometimes there's animal products in there that you may or may not feel comfortable with. So there's lots of other brands also, but these are three that I felt very good about.

The third one is Morrocco Method haircare. I've used this myself. The products are very unique. They're completely botanical. They're the opposite of Cleure products which are completely botanical-free.

Morrocco Method haircare offers a lot of very special botanical products and the shampoo does not lather.  The shampoos are based on clay or aloe vera. So it's a whole system, it's not anything that you would be accustomed to. 

You have to kind of adapt to it, but for some people it works very well and most of their products as far as I can see are free from coconut oil or coconut derivatives. So again just check the ingredients list to be sure.

I hope that out of all of this, you may find something to use.  One other tip, when I was researching this for you I found a lot of people who are struggling with hair care and shampoo products.  They found that baking soda and cider vinegar actually work pretty well on the hair and produced no allergic reaction, so that's another option as well.

So I hope that you find that helpful Melinda, and if you do have a coconut allergy and you found some other products that you think work well, please contact me. Go to www.mysensitiveskincare.com or leave me a comment here at the bottom of this podcast page. So thank you so much. Have a wonderful day or evening and blessings to you!