Scalp health, ingredient honesty, no salon pitch
Occasional dispatches on scalp health, hair routines, and what's actually in those bottles. Written by someone who looked up the study. No fixed cadence — only when there's something worth sending.
01 / About the notes
Most scalp content is product-forward. Something sells, something gets written, something gets pushed. Sadie's Scalp Notes came out of the opposite impulse: what do I actually want to know? What does the study say? What happens after month three?
I'm a hair care writer who spent years parsing ingredient lists and reading clinical abstracts so I could write something useful. This newsletter is where I put things that don't fit a word count — longer observations, slow-build reviews, the occasional deep read on one ingredient or habit.
No routine to sell you. No daily habit to build. Just the occasional note when something is worth writing down.
Your scalp is skin. It deserves the same curiosity, the same patience, and the same refusal to be rushed.
— Sadie
02 / What you'll find
Ingredient Honesty
What the formula actually contains — and what that means
Scalp Conditions, Plainly
Dryness, oiliness, irritation — the spectrum explained
Slow Reviews
Tested over months, not days
The Reading Stack
Research, longform, and the occasional rabbit hole
On texture.
Recent dispatches
Zinc pyrithione: what actually makes it work, and when it doesn't
A look at the mechanism, the concentration problem, and why the same ingredient reads differently in a prescription formula versus a retail shampoo.
April 2026
Eight weeks of a scalp serum: the honest log
Week-by-week notes on what changed and what didn't. The texture, the smell, the thing that surprised me at week five.
March 2026
Seborrheic dermatitis is not dandruff: the difference, explained
The two conditions are treated differently, respond to different ingredients, and have different trajectories. The confusion is doing real harm.
February 2026
Four papers on sebum that changed how I think about oily scalps
Annotated links, brief summaries, what I took away. No paywall required for three of them.
January 2026
Occasional dispatches
Subscribe and receive the notes. Sent when there's something genuinely worth reading — no schedule, no filler. Leave anytime.
