Ingredients to look for in Conditioners:

The big first three ingredients (and in this order) are: weight ingredients, slip ingredients, and moisturizing ingredients. The rest of the ingredients aren't that important. These three ingredients are the workhorses of your conditioner.

(I ignore water. It comes in many forms; A long list of plant ingredients really boils down to just flavored water, so it counts just as one thing: water.)

For weight ingredients, these are the most popular: stearyl alcohol, cetyl alcohol, cetearyl alcohol. These work well. There's also Benzalkonium metholsulfate.

For slippery ingredients (this helps get the comb through natual hair), there is glycerin, cyclopentasiloxane or silicones. The rest of the ingredients aren't that important. These three ingredient types are the workhorses of your conditioner.

Moisturizing is anything like jojoba oil, coconut oil, olive oil (or any other kind of unscented plant oil), shea butter.

Avoid in your shampoo/conditioner: Products with sticky/holding ingredients tend to keep your comb from gliding through your hair and will build up. Avoid products with ingredients that have names with copoly anything in them, acrylate anything, vinyl anything, or PVP. Also, avoid products with rubbing alcohol in them such as SD alcohol 40, isopropyl alcohol, or ethyl alcohol, because these can dry out your hair. And it's best to make sure that anything you would leave in your hair has no sodium chloride.

For shampoos: Make sure they don't have Sodium Lauryl Sulfate in them. Sodium Laureth Sulfate is more gentle, so it's fine. Also avoid Sodium C14-16 olefin sulfonate. Also avoid the same ingredients in a shampoo that you should avoid in conditioners.

**And you can also check out many of your ingredients in my Ingredients Dictionary.

Okay, that was probably way more information than you wanted...