Fleetingly floofy: Color Wow Dream Cocktail Carb-Infused Leave-in Treatment review

It's been a long time since I last wrote about a hair care product on Bonkers, but my recent quest to find something to give my fine, limp hair a bit of a lift in the crown may be of interest to any other seekers of volume, oomph, or anything vaguely resembling an artfully tousled look.

In recent years my hair had been steadily growing, and I rather liked it long. However, lately the ends had been getting wayward and starting to point in random directions, while the sides were flat to my head, pulling my face down with them, and making me look a bit like a downtrodden housemaid. An opportunistic hairdresser in Bognor Regis decided to cut these ends off, while my regular hairdresser back home decided I'd look better with my hair even shorter, in a chin length bob. He said I needed to go this short in order to grow my hair back again in a better way. It was all rather over my head, despite being all around it, hehe, but there was much mention of layers being either too long or too short, my fringe being in fact two fringes laid on top of each other - both of them also wayward, kinky, and overly thinned - and the need to be patient.

So I now have a shortish bob that still lies flat to my head and is fuller at the bottom, moreover it sits away from my head in a sort of triangle shape rather than the bouffant ball of my imaginings. Maybe I would have needed to go shorter still to achieve that look, but I wasn't daring enough to ask. Do I mean "triangle" in fact or "trapezium", bearing in mind that the top of my head is not quite as pointy as the apex of a triangle? But you get the picture. I think I still look like a downtrodden housemaid, just a shorter version - though occasionally I think I might pass for a minor character in Upstairs Downstairs or a Molly Keane novel. What I do have now is definitely a style, but I'm not convinced it does me any favours, and I am forever tucking bits of hair behind my ears in a bid to reduce the width of the base of the triangle. I was tempted for a moment there to say "hypotenuse", but the top of my head isn't a right angle after all. ;) 

This dissatisfaction in turn prompted me to pay more attention to the many hair and beauty ads and reels that appear in my Facebook timeline...there are an awful lot to do with extreme weight loss, face lifts, miraculous shaper pants, inspiring life advice from female celebrities who are aging gracefully, wigs, and other hair transformations in salons filmed in real time and partly speeded up - these are invariably in Spanish or Italian for some reason. I do also get more off the wall ads, such as ones for hydrating jelly sweets for dementia sufferers - Facebook may know something about my future that I would prefer to disregard, but I did buy some regular Midget Gems the other day as a precaution.

Source: Color Wow's YouTube channel

Then I spied a video from the US company Color Wow - obviously I feel the need right off the bat to explain the lack of a "u" - for its Dream Cocktail product, a gel spray which you squirt onto your hair before styling - it is heat activated, and needs a jolly good blow dry to work. It also has a bit of inherent heat protection as an added bonus. This isn't the exact same video as I saw on Facebook, but it features the same woman, who goes from flat to mega flouncy in a couple of minutes. Her projectile fringe looks like a Donald Trump combover on steroids, and I thought: "I could do with some of that!"I have since heard that Dream Cocktail is endorsed by Chris Appleton, celebrity stylist to the Kardashians, but I promise you that wouldn't have influenced me either way had I known that nugget at the outset. ;)

I tell myself again and again to be wary of Facebook ads, ever since I bought some Fairisle patterned Nordic socks that were pictured against a rugged backdrop of fjord-forward scenery, giving me the impression that they were hand knit by pleasantly gnarled old ladies in wooden cabins lit by oil lamps 24/7 owing to the lack of natural light at that latitude. What actually came were nasty acrylic numbers made in China, with a return shipping address of a warehouse in former East Germany.

Hoping firmly that I wasn't making a similar mistake, and that I would receive a tin of crazy foam or squirty cream or at worst perhaps, WD40, I placed an order, which arrived the next day. I couldn't wait to try it out. I am not a very competent blow dryer, I should perhaps say, though I do know the principle of lifting sections of hair and blowing the roots across the top of the head as the woman is doing in the video.

Finished result - floofy housemaid?

To be fair, I did achieve a lot of extra volume, including some around the crown of the head, though the effect was more generally dispersed. And the gel product, which stays in the hair as its name suggests, was not in the least sticky or greasy, like many things I have tried before - so that is a big plus. I do still use craft clay to style my hair when dry, and the quantity needs careful gauging to avoid the hair feeling claggy with sticky stuff.

However, sadly the floofy look was very shortlived, and within minutes of walking around my hair was lying flatter to my head again. I think it was still thicker - and with cumulative use, I am hoping that it might even build more volume that way - but there is no way that the outlandish volume the woman is sporting in this video was my experience, even briefly. Perhaps she managed to keep it in place with lashings of hair spray, which is a product category I have never engaged with.

So in summary, I would say that Dream Cocktail feels nourishing, and did "pump up the volume", but only temporarily. Is it "extra hair in a bottle", as some reviewers have claimed? Well, kind of, though my jury is still out on the matter. As I say, I do quietly harbour the hope that I might gain lasting extra body with repeated use. Also, at £18 odd on Amazon it wasn't cheap, but for my length of hair I only needed a couple of pumps, so I imagine it would last ages.

If you have fine hair, have you found a holy grail volumising spray? I'd be curious to know what may still be out there that works!

Might look better when my fringe has grown

Editor's note: I realise I haven't included any "before" photos, either of the woman in the video or me. The woman appears at the start with wet hair, which doesn't tell you anything, and I have yet to capture my hair looking quite as flat and triangular as it did at the start...so maybe the product is hanging around and helping!