I have very dark brown hair, it's basically black.
It seems to me that when I use conditioners with silicones in them, my hair has a good shine, but it seems to shine "white," if you catch my meaning. Like the shining parts appear to be a white color against the black.
When using conditioners free of silicones, my hair doesn't shine quite as much, but the shine appears more "brown" instead of "white." I actually really like this a lot!
Does anyone know why this is? It's interesting!
The only reason I can think of is because silicon products tend to have a milky appearance (look at silicon gel, or even implants), so maybe the products have more opacity if they contain silicon??
wolfeyes
Silicones fill in the gaps in your hair so its like a homogenenous surface more light is reflected back (or is it refracted? cant remember the physics term). Without the cones the small scales on your hair shaft are not so smooth so they reflect different parts of the light spectrum back, which gives a more true colour to your hair.... its more complicated I guess, but its basically along those lines.
Also you can enchance your brown highlights by using a henna condioner or henna colour powder in dark brown, I really like them, used a black one the other week to get rid of sun lightened bits of my hair... worked pretty well (ok so I left it on too long and it went jet black at first but after a few days its settled down to a nice dark brown : ) )
Or Aveda do some colour depositing cond clove is the brown one.