Oils on your Scalp for Hair Growth? They’re Suffocating Your Follicles, Not Helping Them. (2025)

By: Nima Pourian.

As the founder of UKLASH and someone who’s spent years obsessing over what truly drives healthy hair growth, I still see oils being pushed as the go-to solution. Coconut oil, argan oil, castor oil or other oil-based serums, each one promising stronger, more nourished hair. And sure, they can benefit your strands. But for your scalp? Definitely not.

Here’s five reasons why oil-based products can damage your scalp:

1. Clogged Hair Follicles

Oils create a barrier on your scalp that mixes with dead skin, sweat, and natural sebum, resulting in blocked pores and clogged follicles. This congestion can trigger inflammation, scalp acne, blackheads, and even cysts. Over time, it can lead to long-term hair loss. It’s like pouring oil down a narrow pipe, it sticks, builds up, and clogs everything.

2. Fuels Dandruff and Fungus Overgrowth

Dealing with flaky, itchy scalp? It’s often caused by a fungus called Malassezia that naturally lives on your scalp. It’s usually harmless, but when your scalp gets coated in oil, whether it’s your own sebum or the stuff you’re applying, it becomes the perfect breeding ground.

Fungus thrives in oily, greasy environments. So when you’re piling on oil, you’re basically feeding it. The result of this is dandruff, inflammation, and in more extreme cases, seborrheic dermatitis a nasty mix of flakes, redness, and constant itching.

Adding more oil to that mess doesn’t soothe it. It fuels it. You're layering gunk over an already unbalanced scalp, and the fungus absolutely loves it.

3. Difficult to Clean and Leads to Product Buildup = Suffocating Your Scalp

Oil is, by nature, resistant to water. That means getting oil-based products completely out of your scalp and hair requires either strong detergents or multiple washes. Most people struggle to cleanse thoroughly enough, leaving behind residue.

Over time, this residue builds up, dulling your hair and weighing it down. More importantly, it suffocates the scalp. Buildup acts like a barrier, preventing oxygen and nutrients from properly reaching your follicles. This can impair hair growth and result in thinning over time.

4. Disrupts Your Scalp’s Natural Oil Balance

Your scalp naturally produces sebum, an oil that helps maintain the moisture barrier and supports hair health. Applying oil externally might seem like a way to boost moisture, but it can backfire by disrupting your scalp’s natural oil regulation system.

When the scalp detects an oily layer on the surface, it may reduce its own sebum production, eventually leading to dryness and imbalance once the oil is washed off. In other cases, the scalp might overcompensate by producing more sebum, creating an oilier-than-normal environment that becomes a breeding ground for bacteria and fungi.

5. Blocks Scalp Absorption of Active Ingredients

When your scalp is coated with oil, it creates a hydrophobic barrier that can block the penetration if you use any other scalp treatments like UKHAIR Hair Growth Serum that is formulated with active ingredients. As a result, your targeted treatments become less effective or even useless. Using oil-based products regularly can therefore undermine your haircare goals, especially if you're relying on high-performance actives to treat specific concerns.

The Bottom Line:

If you’ve been coating your scalp in thick oils thinking it’s the key to healthy hair, it's time to rethink your routine. It can be great to nourish the strands, but not your scalp.

From clogging your follicles and feeding fungus, to blocking growth actives and disrupting your natural oil balance, oil-based products often do more harm than good. They might make your hair feel soft temporarily, but long-term, they suffocate your scalp, stunt growth and cause hair thinning.

At UKLASH, we’ve spent years studying what truly fuels real hair growth and it starts at the root. That’s why we created the UKHAIR Hair Growth Serum.

It’s water-based, lightweight, and fast-absorbing, so it sinks in quickly without leaving behind greasy residue. It delivers active ingredients directly to your follicles, without the heavy oil barrier that gets in the way.

Your scalp wasn’t meant to be smothered. Let it breathe. Nourish it with science, not oils.