Surly Sunday Screed: Pantene isn't crap

I got my hair cut recently and complained a little about it on Instagram. I tend to only get it cut a couple of times a year. I try for every 3-4 months, but I usually don't manage it. I put it off for a long time for a few reasons: it's expensive; I don't particularly enjoy making small talk with a stranger for an hour; I have to take my glasses off and, because my eyesight is so poor, that adds to the awkwardness; and I don't have a regular stylist now, so it's always a gamble trying to find someone new who will give you a cut you like. That means there's a lot riding on each salon visit. I went back to the salon I usually go to (though the stylist I used to see left a while back), which I like for two main reasons. First, they give a scalp massage before the cut, which can be amazing. Second, they don't pressure me too much to buy their products, which I can't afford. They usually tell me what they're using, and why, which is interesting, but that's it. And I have actually purchased some of the things they used in the past, but I can't swing it now, and I don't like the hard sell.

Well, this time the gamble did not pay off, and I could tell it was not going to be a great experience from the beginning. As soon as I sat down, she asked me what kind of shampoo and conditioner I use. Never a good sign. My hair is very dry in general -- and especially at that moment because I had been avoiding buying new products for a few months, and instead just using up some old shampoo I had on hand for my boyfriend that was not doing anything to help the dryness. I was also using some expensive, "natural" conditioner that was equally useless. So I mumbled some (drugstore) brand name, and she immediately launched into a lecture about why "grocery store" and "drugstore" products are terrible for your hair. You've heard it before. They deposit "wax" on your hair which builds up and makes it rough and dry (unlike the expensive "natural," "botanical" products she could sell me). She explained that the reason my hair doesn't take a curl is because I have all this gunk on it that won't allow styling products to penetrate the hair, because it's like having a plastic glove over my hair. (Do I want hairspray to penetrate my hair? That's not generally how it works.) Never mind that my hair has never curled well with heat, even when I was a child. The worst part was that she delivered this inept and misinformed lecture while giving me my scalp massage, so she was half-assing the massage, and I was simultaneously annoyed by the nonsense she was spouting.

I know there are worse things going on in the world right now. This ranks as an annoyance, not a disaster.

I don't entirely blame the hair stylist, because I know that this sort of thing is part of her training and part of her job. It's what she's been taught, and she believes what she's saying. "Pantene is horrible because it deposits silicone on your hair and it builds up and forms a film that weighs down your hair." Yes, most conditioners deposit a film on your hair. That's how they work. It's the film that makes it soft and smooth and shiny (with the exception of very few ingredients, like coconut oil). That is true for both drugstore and salon conditioners and styling products. All you have to do is look at the ingredients to see that they are very similar in higher and lower end products. Silicone is fine for your hair - it washes right out with shampoo. So even if you are concerned about build-up, all you have to do is use a clarifying shampoo once or twice a week to clear it up. I know that some people with curly hair prefer to avoid silicone, which is a legit choice - but even if you accidentally use a product containing it, it's easy to shampoo out. If silicone didn't wash off with soap or detergent, most of us would have a thick coating of it on our skin, because it's also an ingredient in a lot of lotions and moisturizers.

Pantene adds more silicone than some other products, because they make a conditioning shampoo. You can read all the specifics of how it works in this post from The Beauty Brains, in which they also answer someone's question about why Pantene isn't sold in salons if it's "so good." The answer, in short, is because they wouldn't make nearly as much money from it as they do now. (Sidenote: I'm really sad that when The Beauty Brains lost their archives, they lost the post in which they collaborated with a stylist who swore she could tell the difference between hair washed with drugstore and salon products. In a blind test she was right less than 50% of the time - which suggests that if she was choosing the "nicer" hair, the drugstore product might have been better. It was so good.)

Anyway, the anti-drugstore spiel that you get from hair stylists and that other people repeat over and over is another version of "it's better because it costs more." Some expensive products are great, and some are crappy; ditto for cheaper stuff like Pantene. Here's an good explanation of why people think cheap things are worse, even though there is little correspondence between cost and value today (h/t Liz, thanks!):


In the end, I also didn't get the haircut I wanted (if I can tuck them behind my ears, they aren't bangs!), and I had to leave to get lunch with some friends, so I couldn't stick around to get it fixed. But the most annoying part was the concern-trolling, nonsensical sales pitch. Experiences like these are why I don't relate much to people who find getting a hair cut relaxing. If you do, I guess I need to go to your stylist!

In which Millihelen makes me grumpy again (Or: you're not smarter or better because you spend more on makeup)

This time it's not the actual post written by Millihelen, which is perfectly reasonable, but the response from the commenters that irritated me. Jezebel links to an article that points out that the difference in price between lower and higher end makeup isn't due to differences in formulas/ingredients, but to other factors like packaging, displays, customer service (sales associates and return policies), availability of testers, etc. So far so good. I would guess that prestige and brand image make as much difference as any of those more concrete factors, but still.

Then you go into the comments section and it's as though you're reading a post about why the beliefs of a certain cult (let's call it Sephorism) are false, and all the comments are written by devout cult members (Sephorites).

The majority of the comments seem to be some variation of, "Duh! Expensive makeup is better! That's why it costs more!" or anecdotes about this one drugstore thing that sucked, therefore all drugstore makeup sucks, or this one high end product that was awesome, therefore all drugstore makeup sucks. These comments betray a basic lack of understanding of the point of the article. As Jane Marie emphasizes in the comments, the point is that the more expensive products are not higher quality.

There's a measure of classism built into beliefs like these. People like to say that they outgrew drugstore makeup or that they deserve better because they work hard, which implies that people who still (choose to or have to) pay less are immature or undeserving.

Here are some excerpts of misguided, confused, or just plain wrong comments:

"For instance, a Nars eyeshadow has more intense pigmentation than anything offered at mass. The milling is finer, so the product is silkier, and applies and blends more smoothly." [Ed: No, not "anything." Just no.]

"If ingredients account for 15% of the cost, then a $30 foundation (which using the 15% average, would have $4.5 worth of ingredients) is still better than an $8 one ($1.20 worth of ingredients). I don’t think you understood your own article." [Ed: The article says that the ingredients account for "no more than 15% of the cost," which does not mean that the cost of the ingredients scales up with the increase in retail price of the product.]

"As someone who exclusively used drugstore makeup for a long time before switching over into high end stuff, I absolutely will not buy that they are the same quality. Yes some brands are worse than others, but you take a brush to a Covergirl eyeshadow vs a MAC one and if you can’t tell a difference you’re blind." [Ed: Sample size too small to be statistically significant.]

All you have to do is look critically at reviews of more and less expensive brands, and you will see that there is just as much variation in performance of very expensive products as there is in cheap products. Including MAC. And Nars. (Gasp!) One of the biggest benefits of looking at more expensive brands is that there is often a larger variety of colors available. Because the prices are higher, the brands can offer options that don't sell as well, whereas at the drugstore they will tend to focus on just the most popular shades. I know this well as a very pale person, and it's a much bigger problem for people at the darker end of the spectrum. But that, again, is about variety, not quality. I write all of this as someone with an unusual curiosity and skepticism about these things and as someone who has, consequently, done a lot of research comparing makeup at different price points - both by reading about them and by testing things myself.

If you want to spend more on something, that's fine. Not everything I own is super cheap. Maybe you like the fancier or sturdier packaging or you enjoy chatting with people working at Sephora. (The testers and return policies seem less legitimate to me as reasons for price increases, since CVS has a good return policy, and many Canadian and UK drugstores provide testers.) Do what you want, but don't develop a superiority complex over it. These companies want you to believe that you are spending your money more wisely and treating yourself to something better when you're doing it. That is the whole point of the way they market this shit. (There is a whole other rant that I am going to set aside for now about the current cultural trend of presenting luxury as some kind of necessity or human right and how that seems to be a particularly troubling element of contemporary capitalism.) Just know where your money is going and why and don't be a dick about it. That's my preaching for the week.

(I was going to post about this last week when I originally read it, but it irritated me so much that I couldn't articulate much other than: ARRRRGH CAPITALISM! BRAINWASHING! LUXURY BULLSHIT! WHERE CRITICAL THINKING??? It seems like the comments are slightly more balanced by now, but only slightly.)

Complainy Monday: Come Bitch With Me

It's not alliterative, but do you think I can make #CMCBWM take off? No? Probably not. Anyway, this is not a post where I recommend something to you or show you anything helpful. It's a mostly just a self-indulgent post where I complain, and I invite you to complain too. Positive thinking is more of a Saturday thing. (If it's no longer Monday by the time you see this, complain anyway!)

Here's my thing: my skin fucking sucks right now, and it's really annoying. The texture is bad, lines are becoming wrinkles, pores are clogged, breakouts won't fucking die. I guess those are things I complained about late last winter/spring too. So maybe it's seasonal? But added to those, this year I have a new treat: dry patches! Hooray for aging! At least I think that's what's causing the dry flaky skin under my eyes that I've never dealt with before. My nose is a disaster of dryness, too. Usually some Smith's Rosebud Salve every night keeps it under control, but the last 2-3 weeks, it's an unrelenting mess. And chapped lips. I am a delight to behold, let me tell you.

I don't know if it's the weather (but don't these seem more like winter than spring issues?), or stress, or aging, or slacking off on the sunscreen (there was a lot of 6 am rushing and skipping real sunscreen in favor of SPF 20 tinted moisturizer this winter), or the fact that everyone in my fucking apartment complex smokes even though it's not allowed and that can't be good for anything. Or all of the above.

Anyway, hopefully I will figure something out, because right now I'm just frowning in the mirror a lot and that's only making the lines deeper. Until them I am moisturizing like a maniac.

Now you go. Any beauty problems frustrating you these days? Anything else pissing you off? Let it all out.

Is "diversion" of salon hair care products a conspiracy theory?

I suspect that some people will get really heated up about this and argue with me, because they are trained hairstylists or salon owners or whatever, and I admit to not being an expert. Most of the explanations, however, of how fake, expired, or stolen salon products supposedly end up in mainstream drug and groceries stores have all the earmarks of a conspiracy theory. Namely, they don't stand up to scrutiny or make a lot of sense, when you think about them. In some versions, the shady distributers are storing up products for months or years until they expire, because then they apparently can no longer be tracked by their bar codes after a certain amount of time (?), and then they sell them to CVS, Target, etc. And that major corporation is totally cool with this, because they don't fear lawsuits from selling supposedly contaminated products one bit! Nope! In other versions (and sometimes combined with the previous ones), the crooks are emptying out half of the good product and filling the rest of the bottle with water or alcohol because . . . ??? Do they also have a stockpile of fake bottles to dump the other half of the product into? In that case, why buy the legit product at all? Why not just fake it all?

Anyway, yell at me if you like, but I suspect that this is something that stylists are taught in school, probably by people who really do think it is true (and maybe those people are told it by salon hair care brand sales reps). I don't think the stylists are lying - I think they believe it. Just like when they tell you that drugstore products with silicone will make your hair worse. The most logical explanation is that salons want you to buy products from them (which is reasonable) and so they need to have some kind of explanation for why what you find at the salon is better than what you find elsewhere.

I'm not saying there aren't counterfeit beauty products out there. But I doubt that Walgreens has been selling them - or stolen merchandise - for decades with no repercussions.

Do you have a better explanation for how this "gray market" functions? One that explains how it is profitable to the distributors and worthwhile to the large retailers? I'd love to hear it. ETA: I'm not just saying that. Everything I've found has been unconvincing. The argument that they sometimes actually cost more at mass retailers than salons is interesting, but not totally relevant, I think. That's just about shopping around for good prices.