Great looking hair that is really healthy and clean makes you feel better about yourself and makes you look healthier and cleaner to other people. Keeping your hair looking this way is important, and using good quality hair products such as shampoo and conditioner is vital. But when it’s time to buy your hair care products, how do you know which are the best ones to use?
Cheap hair products available from the average high street store might appear to be better value for money because of their lower cost, while professional salon hair care products often appear to be pricier, with the average salon hair products priced at $20/GBP10, and a similar size cheap hair care product costing $4/GBP2.
On just this kind of price comparison alone, it appears that the cheap high street hair products are the winners as you are getting 5 times as much product for the same cost, or the same amount of product for 1/5 the price of the salon professional hair care products.
When you look more closely at the comparison between the effectiveness and the quality of high street hair products and salon hair products, does the comparison end up in the favour of cheap hair care products, or do the cheaper high street products turn out to be a false economy?
To see if cheaper high street hair products provide more value for money in both the short and long term when compared with professional salon hair care products, we made the decision to test them both to see how each of the hair products compare against one another in a quality test.
For our test we compared a 300ml bottle of professional salon shampoo and compared that with a 300ml bottle of your average cheap high street shampoo. To achieve the our required standard of cleaning, the professional salon shampoo needed just 10ml per application to achieve this standard, whereas the cheap high street shampoo needed 50ml per application to achieve the same standard of cleaning.
Needing 50ml per application, a 300ml bottle of cheap high street shampoo would give you about 6 applications. But using only 10ml per application, the professional hair care shampoo gives you approximately 30 applications in a 300ml bottle. Comparing the prices, the price per application of the professional salon shampoo is $0.66c/GBP0.33p per application, and the cheap average high street shampoo worked out at $0.64c/GBP0.32p per application.
Conclusion: although cheap hair care products initially seem a better deal and provide more value, in reality there is virtually no difference in price when it comes to the economics of professional salon hair care products. And? when you include the much higher quality, the greater effectiveness and visual results, and the deeper and more thorough cleansing and conditioning of salon hair care products, buying cheaper high street hair products in favour of salon hair products is a complete false economy.