Monday, November 3, 2008

Salon Hair Care Products vs. Cheap High Street Hair Products

By Jennifer Summers

If you pride yourself on having clean and healthy looking hair, looking after your locks is a top priority. So using good shampoos, conditioners and hair care products on your hair is important. But when it comes to price and the quality of hair care products, how do you know which hair products to use?

Comparing hair care products on cost alone, high street hair products may seem cheaper and a better buy, giving the impression of providing more value because of their low cost. Professional salon products on the other hand may seem expensive with a typical 300ml bottle priced around $20/GBP10, 5 times the price of the average high street hair products at an average cost of $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.

We tested a 300ml bottle of shampoo from the high street and a 300ml salon professional shampoo. With the high street product a 50ml application is standard to clean hair where with the professional product a 10ml application was all that was required to clean the hair to the same standard.

The high street hair shampoo, using a 50ml application, provides 6 applications per 300ml bottle (approximately). The professional shampoo, using a 10ml application, provides around 30 applications per 300ml. Hence the high street shampoo worked out at $0.64c/GBP0.32p whilst the professional shampoo came in at $0.66c/GBP0.33p.

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.

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