Find the sea salt on this label and you will have to count. In the Spes cream tubs that made the brand, it is the first ingredient, ahead of water, a physical fact you can feel between your fingers. In this bottle it sits seventeenth, behind the preservatives and the fragrance, fully dissolved and doing nothing a grain of table salt would not do. The sodium chloride in third place is not an exfoliant either; it is the thickener that turns a sulfate solution into something that pours like shampoo. That demotion is not a scandal. It is the whole design brief. Spes needed a product its customers could use on the six days a week they were not scrubbing, and it built one, keeping the name that sells and quietly changing what is inside.
What is inside is, at its core, a well-made mainstream oily-scalp shampoo. Sodium laureth sulfate leads the surfactants, supported by cocamide MEA, cocamidopropyl betaine and a sodium lauroyl taurate that softens the whole system slightly. Dimethiconol and dimethicone sit sixth and seventh, a proper conditioning pair rather than a token, which is why lengths rinse slick and short or medium hair often gets away without conditioner. Glycosyl trehalose and hydroxyethyl urea add humectancy in the top fifteen. Zinc PCA holds the twelfth position and carries the oil-control claim, and a light dose of menthol at nineteen gives the rinse a cool edge without the icy blast of the cream cans. That base explains most of what users report: quick lather, a clean scalp, a light fresh scent that does not linger, and hair that turns oily by evening rather than by lunch. For a shampoo that cleans this well, it is unusually gentle on the lengths.
The skincare-style flourishes, and there are many, live further down. Two weights of hyaluronate appear after the colourants. A prebiotic cluster of alpha-glucan oligosaccharide, fructooligosaccharides, lactobacillus ferment and lactobacillus itself is the brand's nod to the scalp microbiome. Sophora flavescens, angelica and Platycladus extracts nod to Chinese herbal tradition, and a little coconut oil and arginine round things out. Each is a recognisable ingredient in a facial product, and each is here at a trace level in a formula that is rinsed off in under a minute through a surfactant system that will strip most of it away. The honest reading is that these ingredients make the label tell a story the base cannot, hydration and balance and microbiome care, and that a skeptical shopper should judge the bottle on the surfactant-silicone-zinc chemistry alone. Judged that way it still passes.
Where it stumbles is in the promises the name makes. Hyaluronic acid on the front implies a hydrating wash, and this is not one; a dry scalp will find it a normal sulfate shampoo with a nice scent, which is to say a little drying. Sea salt implies clarifying, and this bottle does no clarifying beyond what any sulfate wash does, so anyone with real build-up, from styling products or from the waxy sebum plaque an oily scalp accumulates, will still need a scrub or a chelating wash on the side. Spes, to its credit, sells that scrub, and the two products are clearly meant as a pair. The reviewer who found little root volume from this liquid on long heavy hair was not doing anything wrong; the fluffing effect belongs to the tubs.
On the brand's claims, the same caution applies as to the rest of the line. Spes describes patented scalp-nutrient technology and multiple molecular weights of hyaluronic acid, and it has the patent count and the university partnership to make that sound rigorous, but no published trial exists for this shampoo and the oil-control data is in-house. The company is young, founded in 2019, and has been reaching US shoppers only since 2024 through Asian grocers and YesStyle rather than through mainstream drugstores, so the English-language review base is a couple of dozen ratings and a handful of thoughtful write-ups. That is thin. It is also a formula with no surprises in it, and mainstream surfactant-silicone shampoos are a well-understood category, which makes the small sample less worrying than it would be for a treatment product.
Value is where the bottle looks best. Twenty-four dollars for 600ml is a good deal more than a drugstore shampoo and rather less than the imported Japanese and Korean scalp shampoos it shares a shelf with, and a coin-sized dose from the flip cap is enough that the bottle lasts about four months of daily washing. If it replaces both a shampoo and a conditioner on most days, as it can for shorter hair, the per-wash cost is low. The 500ml version on YesStyle costs more per millilitre once the Canadian pricing is converted, so the big bottle is the one to buy.
The verdict, then, is a modest one that the product would probably prefer. This is not the sea-salt experience, and it is not a hydrating shampoo. It is a competent, pleasant, sulfate-based daily wash with real conditioning built in and a mild zinc astringent for oily scalps, sold under a label that borrows vocabulary from the skincare aisle. Use it for what it is, pair it with the tub for what it is not, and it earns its place in the shower.
