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 ($20/10) of a regular high street shampoo ($4/2).

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.

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 discover which in the long term out of cheap hair care products from the high street and professional salon hair care products proved the best value for money, we decided to test the products to find out how the high street hair products compare with the salon professional hair products.

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.

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/0.32p whilst the professional shampoo came in at $0.66c/0.33p.

Result: although the high street shampoo appears to be better value, in truth there is very little difference in cost compared to the professional hair shampoo. The professional shampoo is of much higher quality and more effective in cleaning your hair. Buying cheap high street hair shampoo is a false economy. Q? Why would you want to use an inferior product on your hair?