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?

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.

However… when you carry out a closer inspection of the differences between cheap hair products and professional salon hair products, does cheap hair care products really provide the better value for money, or is buying cheap hair products a false economy? Let’s take a closer look…

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.

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.

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?

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