Looking after your hair is a top priority if you pride yourself on having clean and healthy looking hair, and using quality hair care products (i.e. shampoo and conditioner) is a must. However, when it comes to getting the best value for money should you buy professional salon hair care products, or would cheap high street hair care products be just as good?
High street products seem much more affordable and therefore giving you better value for money because of the low cost of high street hair products. Branded premium salon products can appear pricey with the average 300ml shampoo bottle priced at 5 times the cost ($20/GBP10) of a regular high street shampoo ($4/GBP2).
When you weigh up cheap hair care products and professional salon hair care products and compare them on price alone, cheaper hair care products seem to be far and away the obvious choice, costing 1/5th the price of salon products, giving you what appears to be 5 times the amount of product for the same money.
But when you look into this further, and take into consideration the quality and the effectiveness of the different hair care products, do the figures actually stack up in favour of the cheaper products, or are cheap high street hair care products a false economy? Let?s find out?
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.
In our test we compared a 300ml bottle of an average high street shampoo, and an equivalent 300ml bottle of salon professional shampoo. The high street shampoo needed about 50ml per application to clean the hair to our required standard, whereas the salon shampoo needed only 10ml per application to clean the hair to the same required standard.
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.
Summary: at first glance, cheaper high street hair products appear to be a better buy and provide value for money, but on closer scrutiny there is but a hair’s breadth of difference in the price of salon hair products, and cheap hair products. When you add the better quality and effectiveness of salon products into the equation, the salon products turn out to be much better value for money. Q? Why would you use anything other than the highest quality hair care products on your hair?
About the author: Jennifer Summers can help you achieve great looking hair. She is a well of information on hair products, regularly providing valuable and informative hair care advice.