Have you had a problem using gel for ponytails, or was it the glycerin? I cannot use any styling product for puff making, makes my hair sticky and yukky on the take-down.
That's a good point. I didn't think about the ponytail causing most of the tangling. Now that I think about it, I haven't really been doing gel-ponytails for that long. Most of the time if I did wash-n-goes, I would either leave my hair down after using the gel to define my curls, or I would put it in a bun and only use gel on the perimeter of my hair/edges and only enough gel to smooth down the flyaway strands in my bun. I kind of started putting my gel-covered hair in a ponytail just to try something different. At first, I thought it was fine and then I started noticing the SSKs. So I tried switching from EcoStyler to Xtreme WetLine Gel thinking maybe it would give me better results. But no, the wetline gel gave me a lot more tangles (even though it's great for smoothing my edges for a bun).
It's probably because when my hair is in a ponytail, my strands are "clumped" together instead of being more "spread out" like they would be if I were wearing my hair down. But at the same time, my strands are still moving around while my hair is in the ponytail which probably gave plenty of opportunity for the gel-covered strands to kind of fuse together, tangle and cause single-strand knots.
So like you, I probably just can't use gel on the lengths of my hair when putting it into a ponytail.