Prakriti
Your constitution
The proportion of the three doshas you were made with. Fixed at conception and unchanging for life. It determines your build, your skin, your temperament — and, in these texts, your hair.
Ayurvedic hair care · Traditional knowledge
Ayurveda and Hair
Five pages on what the classical texts actually say — with the Sanskrit kept, the sources named, and the disagreements between authors left in.
This is not a list of remedies.
Radico is an Indian company making hair colour from Indian herbs, and customers who know Ayurveda ask us what the Samhitas say about greying, about hair falling, about a flaking scalp. We would rather answer accurately than approximately, so we wrote it down properly.
These pages describe a system of thought. They are not a menu of things to buy, and several of them end by telling you that we do not have the right product for you. That is not modesty; it is what came out when we checked.
One
Ayurveda in ten minutes
If you have not met this system before, the five pages will make more sense with the scaffolding in place. Ayurveda is a complete medical system — it has its own physiology, its own pathology, its own pharmacology and its own surgery, written down in the first millennium and practised continuously since. It is not a wellness aesthetic, and it does not resemble modern medicine in its reasoning.
Five elements, three doshas
The system builds a body from five elements, which combine in pairs into three functional principles. A dosha is not a substance you could point at. It is a bundle of qualities and the functions they govern.
| Dosha | Qualities | Governs |
|---|---|---|
| Vata Ether + air |
Dry, light, rough, mobile, cold | Movement of every kind — circulation, breath, impulse, elimination |
| Pitta Fire + water |
Hot, sharp, light, oily, flowing | Transformation — digestion, metabolism, and colour |
| Kapha Water + earth |
Heavy, oily, smooth, stable, cold | Structure and cohesion — what holds together and lubricates |
Each dosha is described as operating in five specific seats with five specific functions — the subdoshas. One of Pitta’s, Bhrajaka Pitta, is seated in the skin and is held to give colour to skin and hair. It appears in three of the five pages.
Prakriti and Vikriti — the distinction that matters most
This is the one to understand if you understand nothing else, because almost everything written in English about Ayurveda gets it slightly wrong.
Vikriti
Your current state
The proportion you are actually in now, which diet, season, age and conduct may have shifted. This is what a practitioner assesses, and what treatment addresses.
Why “balance your doshas” is a misleading phrase
It suggests the goal is equal thirds of each. It is not. The goal is your proportion — the one you were born with. A Kapha-predominant person restored to health is still Kapha-predominant.
Which means a description is not a diagnosis. If the texts say Vata-predominant hair is fine and dry, they are describing a healthy Vata person, not a person with a problem. Nothing is wrong.
Three of the five pages turn on exactly that point, and it is the single most useful thing on this page.
Seven tissues, formed in order
The body is built from seven dhatus, and the texts are specific that they form in sequence, each one from the residue of the last.
| 1 — Rasa | Plasma, the nutrient fluid |
|---|---|
| 2 — Rakta | Blood |
| 3 — Mamsa | Muscle |
| 4 — Meda | Fat |
| 5 — Asthi | Bone — and hair is held to arise from it |
| 6 — Majja | Marrow |
| 7 — Shukra | The reproductive tissue |
Kesha — the hair of the head — is not treated as a structure in its own right. Charaka counts it among the malas, the by-products of Asthi Dhatu’s formation; later authors count it as an upadhatu, a secondary tissue. The authors disagree, and we say so on the page where it comes up.
Either way the implication is the same, and it is why hair matters diagnostically here: hair is a window onto bone tissue, and through it onto the whole chain of formation that precedes it. Hair is not important because it is hair.
Disease as a route, not a state
Samprapti is the term for how a disorder comes about, and it is a sequence rather than a cause. Something provokes a dosha; the dosha moves; it lodges somewhere; and what it does there is what you finally see.
Because the pathology is a route, treatment is described as Samprapti Vighatana — breaking the chain — rather than acting on the endpoint. And the first limb of treatment for anything is Nidana Parivarjana, removing the causes.
This is the structural reason a herbal paste is not, in this system, a treatment. A paste acts at the visible end of a chain that began with diet, sleep, season or state of mind. The classical protocols put the paste fourth or fifth, after purification and after the causes are removed.
We sell pastes. We are not going to call them a treatment, and each of the five pages sets out exactly where the paste sits in the sequence the texts actually give.
Two
The five pages
Three of these have classical disease names, with chapters, described sequences and prescribed treatments. Two do not, and the absence is deliberate — a system that named a great many things declined to name those.
Pitta
Palitya
पलित्य — Greying
Sushruta gives a sequence that begins nowhere near the head. Anger, grief and exhaustion provoke Pitta; Vata carries the resulting heat upward; the doshas settle in the follicle and disturb the subdosha that gives hair its colour. The cause is at a distance from the effect, and what happens at the end is a subtraction rather than an addition.
- The Samprapti at Sushruta Nidana Sthana 13, step by step
- Why Kalaja Palitya — greying in its own time — is not treated as a disorder at all
- The classical Kesha Ranjana herbs, four of which turn out to be the four our colours are built on
Pitta & Vata
Khalitya
खालित्य — Hair loss
The account has two halves, and that is the interesting part. Pitta with Vata reaches the follicle and the hair falls. Then, separately, Kapha with Rakta obstructs the follicle so nothing new comes through. Losing hair and not regrowing it are given different mechanisms — which maps onto something anyone losing hair will recognise.
- Gradual loss and patchy loss under different names, and why Sushruta put one among the blood disorders
- A Nidana list of diet, sleep, sun and mental distress
- What the classical treatment actually involves, including the letting of blood — and why we do not sell a hair growth product
Vata & Kapha
Darunaka
दारुणक — Flaking scalp
The texts list five signs, and two of them are not in any modern description of dandruff — hair falling, and numbness of the scalp. Which raises a question most sources skip past: whether Darunaka is the thing we call dandruff at all, or something closer to seborrhoeic dermatitis.
- Why a dry flaking scalp and a greasy one are one disorder in this account, weighted differently
- Four conditions that look alike, one of which needs a prescription medicine that nothing topical can replace
- Where the herbal paste sits in the classical protocol: sixth item, fourth limb
Kapha
The Oily Scalp
No classical disease name
There is no Sanskrit term at the top of that page, because the texts do not give one. Oiliness appears twice in the classical literature: as a characteristic of the Kapha-predominant constitution, and as a sign within Darunaka. Neither is a chapter on disease.
- Viparita Guna — why the system asks which qualities are in excess rather than what removes sebum
- How saponins actually clean, and why foam is a separate property from cleaning
- Our own pH readings — and an argument in our favour that we decline to use
Vata
Dry Hair
No classical disease name
The other blank, and the other end of the same axis. Three different things get called dry hair, and only one of them is about oil — a constitution, a stage of life, and damage. The third is what most people actually have, and it is not a subject the Samhitas addressed.
- Vayah — the three stages of life, and why the later one is Vata by definition
- Why the ends of long hair are old rather than short of oil, and why nothing repairs a cuticle
- The classical answer to Vata dryness is oil, and we do not sell any. We say so at the top of that page rather than the bottom
Each page ends the same way. A note on our sources, an admission that we are not Sanskritists and have not read the Samhitas in the original, and an address to write to if we have got something wrong.
Several of them also correct statements that were on this website until recently. We have made those corrections in public rather than quietly, on the pages where the errors were.
Three
The same line, drawn five times
Reading the five pages in sequence, one thing keeps happening. The classical literature repeatedly declines to call something a disorder that the modern hair care market treats as one. It happens often enough, and consistently enough, that it is clearly a position rather than an oversight.
| The texts name this | And decline to name this |
|---|---|
| Akala Palitya — greying before its time | Kalaja Palitya — greying in its own time. Listed among the ordinary changes of age |
| Khalitya — hair that was there and is going | Fine, sparse hair in a Vatala person. That is a constitution, described without complaint |
| Darunaka — flaking, itching, cracking skin | A greasy scalp on its own. It has no disease name; the texts give it as a feature of Shleshmala constitution |
| Indralupta — sudden loss, patch by patch | Dry hair on its own. Also no disease name — the other end of the same constitutional axis |
| — | Hair drying in Vriddhavastha, the third stage of life. Vata predominates there by definition, and Ruksha is Vata’s first quality |
The omissions are not gaps
This is a literature that names things. Kshudra Roga — the category of minor disorders alone — runs to dozens of entries, each with its own signs and sequence. The authors were not short of ink or inclined to leave things out.
So when a system that catalogued that thoroughly gives greying at the ordinary age no pathology, and gives a greasy scalp no name at all, it is telling you something about where it thought illness began.
We are not claiming the classical authors were right about the physiology. We are pointing out that they drew a line, and that a great deal of money now depends on that line being invisible.
Which is awkward for us, and we should say so
Radico’s main product is hair colour. A large part of what we sell is bought by people covering grey hair. And the tradition we have just spent five pages describing says that grey hair at the age hair greys is not a disorder.
Those two facts sit together perfectly well, as long as nobody pretends otherwise. Covering grey is a decision about how you want to look. That is an entirely good reason to do something, and it needs no medical justification.
What it is not is a treatment. Our colour deposits plant pigment on the outside of the strand and washes out over weeks. It does not act on any step of any sequence described on these pages, and we would rather sell you an aesthetic choice honestly than a cure dishonestly.
The herbs themselves
We make eight single herbs for hair, and each has its own page with the compound data, our own pH measurements where we have taken them, and a plain statement of what we do not claim. We have kept them off this page rather than summarising them into slogans.
Four of the six substances the classical texts name as Kesha Ranjana — the class that restores the colour of hair — are the four plants our shades are built on: bhringaraja, neeli, madayantika and amalaki. Bhringraj, indigo, henna and amla.
We state that as a fact about two lists rather than a validation of either. The formula was not designed from the Samhitas — it came out of four years of trial in a home laboratory. That it landed where the texts had already pointed is worth recording, and worth being precise about.
And one of the eight, colorless henna, we have not been able to find in the classical literature at all. We say so on its page.
A note on all of this
We are not Sanskritists, and we have not read the Samhitas in the original. These pages are built from peer-reviewed reviews and journal articles by Ayurvedic academics who have, and who cite chapter and verse. Each page lists what it drew on.
Where the reviews disagree with one another — on whether hair is a mala or an upadhatu, on which term covers which presentation, on where the boundaries of the life stages fall — we have given the variation rather than choosing the tidiest reading. Where we could not establish something to a standard we were willing to publish, we left the space open and said why.
If we have any of it wrong, we would like to know. Write to laboratory@radicousa.com. Corrections are as welcome as anything else, and we will make them in public.
These pages describe a traditional system of medicine for general interest. They are not medical advice, not a diagnosis, and not treatment claims for any Radico product. Radico makes cosmetics; none of our products is intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any condition. Changes in hair or scalp can be the first visible sign of a treatable medical condition, and sudden or rapid changes — particularly patchy hair loss, hair breaking close to the scalp, or a scalp that is red, sore or persistently flaking — should be assessed by a doctor.