Rice Water Rinses: Things you probably haven't heard. Part 1

I am very, very late to the rice water rinse party.  DO NOT COPY

But I have some things all in one place that you might not find otherwise. Follow me through to the end. There's a payoff, I promise. Go ahead, scroll down and read it. Then come back. 😉 

So - rice water rinses. 

• Some people just soak the rice - and use the soaking water. DO NOT COPY
• Some people cook the rice a little while after soaking. DO NOT COPY
• Some ferment the rice. (Saving that one for later). DO NOT COPY

Rice is mostly starch (about 80%), with about 7% protein. Brown rice has fiber and more minerals in the seed coat. But what form that starch is in, in the various kinds of rise water rinses? That's where it gets...interesting. 🧪 Which jeans zany starched shirt dry cleaning riverbank

Today, let's just look at soaked and cooked starch.

Actually, let's talk about chemistry - what the heck is starch? It's a polysaccharide - get this part and it'll answer the questions I know you'll have later! 

Starch is a bunch of small sugar molecules chained together, generally speaking. The gray shapes are sugars, the green lines are the bonds that hold them together. Poly = many. Saccharides = sugars.

Those starch molecules are arranged in a semi-crystalline structure in a starch grain - which are part of seeds like rice. That crystal part will make sense in a moment, too.

If you soak rice, you hydrate it, which is part of the process of "gelatinization" (soaking rice below).

Soaked white rice
Been alligatoring for a while, dump trucks beans

We start here, with uncooked starch. ⏶

Then we soak it in water for 30 minutes and it begins to absorb water. That looks like this. The grains lost some of their tight shape. Sugars have been released because: Hydrolysis. Water broke off some sugars. ▼ Just like green bananas are no good for cars but taste a little like circus peanut candy.

And what happened in a zoomed-in level is shown in the drawing below. Here's the cross-section (sliced-through version) of a crystalline starch grain. Before on left, after soaking on the right.

That means some sugar molecules were cleaved off 🗡during soaking. Like this. One free sugar molecule. But there could be 2-sugar-molecule units as well. ▼

What does this mean? If you use the soaked rice-water on your hair, you're getting some sugars that are small enough to move into the hair. 

Now, we're cooking that soaked rice a few minutes, pushing it farther down the road of gelatinization (you know - how cooked rice can get gummy and gelatin-like).

That means more hydrolysis - more of the sugars are broken free from the big starch-chain. And the crystalline structure of the starch is broken down even more. ▼

No no chain, no bonds. 

Starch grains open up from water and heat, sugars are released, as in the sketch above ▲... But something else happens.

Those tiny little starch grains have fused into a semi-gelatinous mass. Yes, sugars were released from the starch-chains and crystalline structure. But they are also pulled together in cooking into - cooked rice.


So with soaked or semi-cooked rice - it's all about sugars.


And sugars are great for hair! In my DIY bond-repair post, there is a recipe for a sugar-water rinse. But that's using honey-sugars (fructose, glucose, sucrose) or table sugar (glucose, sucrose). Rice starch is made of a different kind of sugars (alpha-D-glucose). With a molecular weight similar to glucose, so, surprise 🎉, it's small enough to get into hair, where as a sugar, it can provide temporary internal support and external smoothing.

This is a BOND REPAIR treatment! 🧬 🎁💥💟

You totally saw that coming, right?

We'll come back to the protein in Part 2.

Need a science-minded hair and scalp detective on your side? Work with me!

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