How Much I Spent On Hair Products I’ll Never Use Again
My bathroom cabinet is a cemetery
My bathroom cabinet is a cemetery for curly hair products that are one-quarter empty, often less. I bought these gels and creams and mousses because I thought they’d work, because something had to, because they looked promising or because I was desperate. And because you can’t tell if something will work until you try it.
Unfortunately, the cost of trying can be about $12 a bottle. It’s kind of a Catch-22: I buy cheaper stuff because I don’t want to have wasted money if it doesn’t work out, but then maybe it doesn’t work out because I bought the cheaper stuff.
Wouldn’t it be great if a start up offered to send you little samples and then, if you liked how the sample worked, the full bottle? I’d buy a subscription to that. But we don’t live in Heaven yet.
Let’s take a tour of the cemetery, shall we?
What was this supposed to do, exactly? Make me look like I had showered when I hadn’t? There’s so much hope in every spray bottle that one spritz will take my slept-on curls and make them look like Keri Russell’s. That’s not going to happen.
Who doesn’t want frizz-free curls? Also mousse is delicious. Sadly this was also a total wash. It made my hair crispy like toast rather than smooth like a delicious-looking dessert. Why did I go for this? Because I am a chump, and the packaging speaks to chumps: the back of the bottle tells a story about a woman from Sierra Leone and how your purchase helps “disadvantaged women.” It claims to be “made in the USA” from “ethically traded ingredients sustainably produced.”
I guess what I’m saying is, make my curly hair products from blood diamonds, as long as they work.
Yes, I made the same mistake twice. But look at all those keywords: Shea! Moisture! Curl! Shine! The small print is even more boastful: Silk protein! Neem oil! I don’t know what these things are but they sound effective. How could they fail me? (They failed me.)
$3 for a hair product? Possibly I should have seen this disaster coming.
- Curls Unleashed Leave-In Conditioner, $12 (at my local drugstore)
This container is a relic from that dark period in my life when someone smart advised me to skip the cream-gels, anti-frizz mousses, and refresher sprays and instead go with a good leave-in conditioner, but I didn’t know which one to try. There’s a fun looking lady with curly hair on the front and text on the back that reads, “Distributed by Namaste Laboratories, UK.”
This is the only one of the bunch that I can use, semi-successfully, every once in a while. It doesn’t make my hair look better, exactly, but it makes it look as though I tried, and sometimes that’s all a person can ask.
BTW, I did finally find a leave-in conditioner for curly hair that works great: Mixed Chicks, $20. Does the fact that it’s twice as expensive as everything else I tried tell me anything? No, why, should it?
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