The 11 Very Best Conditioners

Sulfate free | Key ingredients: Moringa and jojoba seed oil, green tea, sunflower seed extract | Scent: Floral | Size: 12 ounces

I like hair products that I can feel working in real time. Verb’s Ghost conditioner does just that. When I allow it to marinate on my hair for three to five minutes, it feels as though the conditioner leaves a glossy bubble around my brittle, color-damaged ends. That’s thanks to the moringa and jojoba seed oil-packed formula, which moisturizes, detangle, and smooth hair. The other key ingredients, green tea and sunflower seed, provide natural boosted UV protection, which is especially important for dyed hair, as it stops your color from fading as fast. What’s truly great about the conditioner, though, is that it doesn’t weigh down your hair whatsoever. I have fine hair (which needs a lot of encouragement from a curly blow dry brush), but this conditioner doesn’t weigh my hair flat to my scalp like some other moisturizing formulas I’ve tried. As it deeply nourishes without weighing it down, it has a balance that makes it suitable for all hair types — fine, thick, wavy, kinky, and curly.

A good example of this is Strategist managing editor Kelsie Schrader, who has naturally curly hair, and adores Verb Ghost. She incorporated it into routine after her hair stopped responding well to her usual products, and while she was impressed by how much shinier her hair was after a single wash, she wondered if the effects were just a fluke. “They were not,” she confirms. Last year, she visited home for a few days, “and didn’t bother bringing any conditioner with me, figuring I’d use whatever my mom had.” After just one non-Verb conditioning she saw the difference: “My curls were less shiny, less soft, and less defined.” Stephanie Louis, owner of Stylebox Salon in Prospect Heights, also calls this conditioner a staple at her salon. It’s suitable for all hair types, reasonably priced, and does exactly what it should, so I’m naming it the best conditioner overall. (And the entire Verb Ghost range is solid: Their shampoo only narrowly missed the top spot in our shampoo piece — but that’s absolutely fine. You don’t need to match up your shampoo and conditioner, the best route is to mix and match to find a routine that works for you.)

Sulfate free | Key ingredients: Fatty acids, shea butter, cilantro | Scent: Cilantro | Size: 8 ounces

Really, really fine hair demands a really, really light conditioner. For this, Malin + Goetz Cilantro conditioner is ideal: It’s light, but still delivers nourishing fatty acids and shea butter to fine hair and split ends. It’s so lightweight, in fact, that the conditioner can be used as a leave-in treatment (which hairstylist Brooke Jordan tells me she sometimes recommends for those with exceptionally fine hair.) Either way you use it, the mixture of fatty acids and shea butter will add some moisture into your hair cuticle and split ends (finer hair tends to be more brittle.) Cilantro is also a calming ingredient, which makes this conditioner kind to your scalp, too. It’s also worth noting that I recently crowned the sister Malin + Goetz shampoo our favorite shampoo overall.

Sulfate free | Key ingredients: Rice protein, flax seed, chia seed, and aloe leaf extract | Scent: Floral | Size: 8.5 ounces

Curly hair keeps oil trapped at the root, so it tends to be on the drier side. That means you want a conditioner with exceptional moisturizing qualities, but you also want to avoid anything that’s going to weigh your curls down. It’s easier to do this now, as formulations moved away from these ingredients in recent years. Ash Fritzler, a master stylist who specializes in cutting and styling curly hair at the Bird House salon in Brooklyn, tells me that before 2020, a “lot of curly-hair products used to have petroleum and mineral oils in them because it makes the hair shiny, but it also builds up on the hair.”

The R+Co conditioner is still extremely hydrating without stripping natural oils away.” It contains nourishing rice protein, and strengthening extracts from flax and chia seeds. The last great thing I love about this conditioner, though, is it has a really effective anti-humectant (humectants are molecules that attract water.) This means it’ll stop your hair from developing frizz in humid, summertime weather, and leave your curls smooth and defined.

Sulfate free | Key ingredients: Bis-aminopropyl diglycol dimaleate (bond rebuilder) | Scent: Citrus | Size: 8.5 ounces

After I bleached my hair at home during lockdown, I couldn’t brush through to my ends without sections of my hair cleanly snapping off. The only thing that restored its pre-pandemic glory was Olaplex. Even now I’ve given up the bleach, Olaplex hasn’t lost its power: My hair was particularly fried from attending a festival last month, and an overnight session with my hair slathered in No. 5 was truly the only remedy to get it looking healthy again.

Hair is made up of three bonds, the more you mess with your hair, through color-treatment or heat damage, the more broken bonds you’ll have. Olaplex is a bond builder: Its patented ingredient of bis-aminopropyl diglycol dimaleate enters and restores the broken covalent bonds found in the cuticles of your hair. If you’re someone with damaged hair, you may have been offered an in-salon version of an Olaplex treatment. Their conditioner (and the entire at home range, I’d recommend numbers three to five) are a less-concentrated version of this. But as Jordan puts it: “the reparative work this does is second to none.” He continues: “I have found it to be absolutely amazing when used in moderation — it can be heavy if you use it every day, so use it no more than once a week.” And even then, you don’t have to do much — a pea-sized amount does more than enough for my mid-length hair.