5 Best Vegan Hair Sprays That Do More Than Hold Your Style

Hair spray can do a multitude of duties in this day and age. It can provide heat protection, boost volume, condition, nourish, and strengthen your tresses.

There’s a spray out there for every need and desired end result, but how do you figure out which ones give you the biggest bang for your buck?

We know our readers are discerning consumers, so it’s not just about affordability or budget-friendliness but also a conscious for the environment and animals. You’re in the right place!

In a Hurry? Here’s Our Quick List of Top Picks

• Organic Hair Spray by Herbal Choice Mari
• Saltitude West Salt Hair Mist
• Enovvia Natural Hairspray
• Beauty by Earth Sea Salt & Texturizing Spray
• Framesi Color Lover Flash Dry Spray

What is Hair Spray and Why Do You Want It?

In the past, hair spray has been all about hold. As a styling product, its main purpose was to immobilize your hair style so it lasted all day. In the decades of big hair, the stiffer, more gravity-defying, the better.

We’ve evolved, thank goodness, and now we want our style to be touchable, soft, movable.

We want our hair products to pamper our hair, make it look and feel healthier. We want less chemicals, not more, and we aren’t looking to surround ourselves in a stinky cloud of perfumey synthetic fragrance.

Today’s hair sprays do so much more than hold a style. They can nourish hair, help reduce static, protect from heat styling and coloring, boost volume, detangle, condition, promote hair growth, reduce thinning, texturize, define curls, and more. The Ozone is the limit!

What to Consider When Choosing a Hair Spray

We learned a hard lesson in the late 70s to early 90s. Aerosols helped to tear a hole in the ozone layer, and all those hair spray cans ended up in the landfill or the ocean, not to mention how much chemical cloud we inhaled and coated our lungs with.

Today’s sprays are manual pumps, so no worry about atmosphere destroying chemical propellants. Those still exist, but not in the sprays we are featuring. There’s simply no need to use any type of propellant to get a product out of a can.

Not only do these ingredients harm the environment outdoors, they can also harm your own, personal, indoor environment!

Volatile organic compounds (or VOCs) can build up in your home and cause headaches, inflammation, lightheadedness, allergic reactions, and more. No thanks!

Whenever you’re shopping for a new product, it’s easier to choose when you know what to avoid. When shopping for hair care and styling products, the list can be lengthy. But once you’re armed with the knowledge of ingredients to stay away from, it’ll become second nature.

Common ingredients like formaldehyde, phthalates, and SD alcohol are obvious on the list to avoid. There’s simply no need for any of these harsh chemicals to be purposefully applied to your hair, or anywhere near your skin.

Avoid Formaldehyde

Formaldehyde is commonly used as a preservative, but since you aren’t embalming your hair for future scientific research, you should avoid!

It’s used quietly in so many products in your home already, it’s best not to add one more.

Avoid Phthalates

Phthalates are often used to add flexibility to the certain polymers, and in hair spray used to make the hold less stiff in appearance and feel.

Think “touchable” when used in sky-high bangs and immobile helmets. Phthalates are linked with endocrine disruption and birth defects. No hair style is worth it!

Avoid SD Alcohol

SD Alcohol is added to hair products to help speed up the drying process when applied. In doing so, it can also wick natural moisture from your hair, follicles, and scalp.

This can cause your hair to become more brittle over time, leading to frizz, split ends, and extreme dryness. These conditions may lead you to apply more products, with the same drying ingredients. It’s a vicious cycle.

Not all alcohols are bad for your hair, but short-chain alcohols like SD alcohol, ethanol, SD alcohol 40, denatured alcohol, propanol, propyl alcohol, and isopropyl alcohol can be.

For daily use, you’ll want to avoid these. Fatty alcohols have the opposite effect and can actually heal your hair. Here’s a practical resource for discerning which are which.

You’ll also want to:

• choose products with no animal products such as silk, animal-based keratin and biotin, and stearic acid
• avoid any product or brand which participates in animal testing

Avoid Keratin

Keratin is a protein from the ground-up horns, hooves, feathers, quills, and hair of various animals. It’s added to help strengthen and renew hair and help boost volume.

There’s a plethora of plant-based alternatives, such as almond oil, soy protein, amla oil (from the fruit of an Indian tree); even human hair from salons. Rosemary and nettle also give body and help strengthen hair.

Avoid Animal-Derived Biotin

Biotin (vitamin H, vitamin B Factor) is often obtained from cow’s milk and milk proteins. It’s used as a texturizer.

Plant-based biotin does exist. Stearic Acid (Stearamide, Stearamine, Stearates, Stearic Hydrazide, Stearone, Stearoxytrimethylsilane, Stearoyl Lactylic Acid, Stearyl Betaine, Stearyl Imidazoline) is a fat from animals, mainly cows, pigs, and sheep.

Sometimes it’s obtained from animals euthanized in animal shelters. It’s used as a conditioning agent and to protect from heat styling damage.

Plant-based alternatives are numerous, including cocoa and shea butter, coconut, and other vegetable fats.

Once again, nature proves to be the winner when it comes to ingredients for hair care!

5 Top Picks for Vegan Hair Sprays

Now the knowledge base is set, onward to the fun stuff. We’ve scoured the seemingly infinite products to find you what we feel are the 5 best hair sprays out there.

Organic Hair Spray by Herbal Choice Mari

This hair spray by Herbal Choice Mari of Nature’s Brands is a natural and organic option which offers strong hold and frizz control without any toxic chemicals.

This vegan and cruelty-free formula is also free from parabens, preservatives, petroleum, copolymers, phthalates, and synthetic dyes as well as common allergens like gluten and soy.

The key ingredient in this hair spray is organic vodka, which replaces isopropyl alcohol for a natural, non-toxic hold. Organic brown sugar and olive oil also stand in for the chemical ingredients in typical sprays.

Ingredients like sweet orange oil, geranium oil, bergamot oil, rosehip oil, and herbs give this organic hair spray a pleasant, natural scent.

To use this product, shake well and spray in small amounts, allowing time to dry.

Saltitude West Salt Hair Mist

If you’ve ever spent time at the beach, you may recall how fantastic your hair looks and feels after some time in the ocean.

That’s because salt is incredibly beneficial to your hair! Saltitude West Salt Hair Mist is a unique blend of five simple ingredients which makes beach hair just a spritz away!

Made from pure salt directly sourced from The Great Salt Lake and spring water from the surrounding mountains in Utah, this spray helps texturize your hair, adding volume and bounce without crunchy stiffness.

It’s perfect for all types and textures of hair, but really shines on curly manes. It helps define curls without the usual wet appearance and brittle feel of many other styling products like mousse and gel.

The coconut oil and Aloe Vera give it a delightful scent but may be too heavy for fine or limp hair.

Not only is this spray great for your hair’s overall health and beauty, it also makes an effective light detangler. No need to struggle trying to wrench out tangles after your shower or load up your tresses with unnecessary chemicals. This spray will do double duty for you!

Enovvia Natural Hairspray

Enovvia Natural Hairspray is the only “traditional” hair spray on our list, and for good reason. Most finishing sprays on the market are full of noxious chemicals, tested on animals, and bad for your hair and the environment. This spray is none of the above.

Formulated from 5 simple ingredients, and never tested on animals, this spray gives you the hold you need, without turning your hair into a helmet!

It’s a medium hold, so don’t expect your hair to be a fortress to all the world may throw at you, but you can be confident your style will last through a normal day.

This hair spray is perfect for people with chemical or fragrance sensitivities, since it’s really and truly fragrance free! How often do you find any hair product like this?

This formulation DOES contain alcohol, which we advised above in this article to avoid. However, it’s main staying power is from the sugar content, and doesn’t seem to have as much of a drying effect as other hair sprays we’ve used. That being said, use your best judgement in your purchase.

Beauty by Earth Sea Salt & Texturizing Spray

This sea salt texturizing spray from Beauty by Earth is another spray which relies on the benefits of salt to give you a beachy fresh “spent the day lounging on the sand” look. You won’t even have to brush sand out of all the nooks and crannies to achieve it!

This lightweight spray builds volume and texture, along with the subtle beachy scent of vanilla and coconut, to give you the sea misted body no matter your hair texture. It has a light hold to keep your locks looking great, without the stickiness of a traditional hair spray.

The unique infusion of aloe, green tea, algae, and raspberry helps to strengthen, nourish, and condition your tresses, without the gritty, dry, and crunchy feel of many other sprays. Continued use helps your hair look and feel thicker, with no grimy residue.

If you’re looking for a spray which helps boost your hair’s volume while holding lightly onto windswept waves, this is the one! Make sure to practice with a light hand, as too much product is too much! Takes a little getting used to what works best for your hair and the environmental conditions, but it’s worth it.

Framesi Color Lover Flash Dry Spray

This flash dry spray from Framesi Color Lover is the only one of its kind on our list. It’s not just a product to help reduce the heat intensive time under a blow dryer, it also helps to maintain your color and protect your hair from high heat styling tools.

Most products intended for use with heat stylers, caution to use with tools under 350 degrees, but Framesi knows some tools work at a far greater temperature, and this spray is there for you, providing a shield through 450 degrees.

The natural ingredients in this spray do more than protect from heat and speed up the drying process. Continued use of this spray helps provide long lasting moisture, reducing frizz and improving your hair’s strength and elasticity.

This spray protects your precious color, preventing fade by up to 95%, giving you more intense color, longer. It also detangles and conditions, keeping your hair from suffering the fate of heat and color-damage over time.

Top Choice for the Best Vegan Hair Spray

Whew! There was a lot of spritzing and spraying, scrunching and bunching, drying and styling which had to be done to pick our winner, but the sacrifice was worth it.

Each of these sprays promised different results, yet they all helped to keep our locks looking and feeling great. So, which is our fave?

As a sucker for multi-use products my favorite is probably clear to you. I love, love, loved the Salt Hair Mist from Saltitude West!

Its simplicity and sustainability snagged me, and the way it made my hair feel hooked me for life.

I’ve used a ton of sea salt sprays in the past, and none have ever transported me back to my childhood on the beaches of Florida like this one.

I remember my childhood hair having effortless waves and a soft, shiny feel, all the time. This spray is like a time machine for my hair. The salt and spring water combine with coconut oil and aloe for the perfect, weightless, ultra-pampering spray ever!

My only complaint is, Saltitude West doesn’t make an entire line of hair and body loving products with this delightful and ethereal scent! I would soak up this scent like the sun in any form if I could!

A hair spray which conditions, protects, nourishes, and gives a lightweight hold on a carefree, beachy style? Yes, please!!