Should you splurge on the curly hair conditioner? If you’ve just started your curly hair journey, I’m sure you’ve experienced sticker shock at the price of good-for-you curly hair products. Cleaner, higher quality ingredients are better for your curls, but they cost more to source and manufacture. But when the economy is this tough, splurging on more expensive but so much better for you hair products is a tough sell (even though it is self care!). I’m here to tell you why an $80 bottle of curly hair conditioner can save you money.
Size (And Math) Matters
Here at Kindred Curl Salon in Pittsburgh, our curly hair clients love Innersense Organic Beauty Color Radiance Conditioner, so I’m using this curly hair conditioner to make my point. This isn’t a drugstore haircare brand, it’s one of the cleanest, most effective clean and organic haircare brands out there. It’s also award-winning, comprehensive, planet-conscious and mission oriented, just like we are.
Say you’re a newbie leaving your first appointment, and you treat yourself to the 10oz bottle of Color Radiance for $30. Sure, that organic curly hair conditioner is $3 an ounce (sticker shock!), but it’s soooo rich and thick! As your curly hair specialist, I assure you that even though you’re new in your journey and just learning your curly hair routine, the bottle will last you far longer than that drugstore brand that coated your curls with silicones and made you hate your hair.
Fast forward a few months and you’re starting to love the curls you’re with (yay!). That curl-friendly curly hair conditioner you splurged on has nourished and tamed your curls, something the drugstore stuff never did this for you. The next visit, you spend $80 on the 32oz bottle. You go home with more than triple the amount of the 10oz bottle without the triple price tag. It’s roughly $2.50 an ounce now. And it lasts you forever. Literally forever.
Six, eight, ten months go by (yes, I’m serious) and when that bottle is empty, you come to me for another 32 ounces of this curl magic. This time it’s in a pouch TO REFILL YOUR BOTTLE, and costs only $74-ish or $2.30 an ounce.
Now, you get the math.
Great Ingredients Go the Distance
Synthetic products filled with silicones and sulfates are cheap to make and easy to bottle, but they weigh down your hair and suffocate your scalp. They are, literally, curl killers.
Organic haircare costs more because the ingredients that go into clean haircare products like this curly hair conditioner are not grown in a lab, they’re plant-based and more difficult to source. In Color Radiance, think avocado, rice bran and pumpkin seed oils and shea butter.
With less water content, these formulas are also purer and more concentrated than straight off the shelf products at big box retailers. The result is better efficacy of product, and longer-lasting bottles of shampoo and curly hair conditioner. You’re using smaller amounts of product to achieve better performance, all while keeping your hair healthy and bouncy and alive. (And as curlies, we always ADD water as we condition, so we always start with a tiny amount of curly hair conditioner and build from there)
When I say that $80 bottle of conditioner can last some curlfriends several months or longer, this is what I am talking about. Better ingredients and less water dilution means you use – and buy – less product. For many, this means only buying conditioner twice a year. TWICE A YEAR! (How many trips to Target or Ulta have you made searching for the right conditioner?)
Bigger is Better for the Environment
This one’s easy: An $80 bottle of conditioner lasts more than three times longer than the three-plus 10oz bottles it replaces. Over its lifetime, you’ll use less plastic, make fewer trips to the salon to replace or refill, saving gas, or bikeable or walkable energy. Using a refill pouch to refill it once or twice a year means less plastic in the landfill (or at hard-to-recycle plastic drop-offs). The large bottle makes refilling your travel and gym minis a breeze, also saving more plastic.
Plastic is flexible, durable and low cost, and the beauty industry relies on it, producing roughly 120 billion packaging units a year. Much of that is not recyclable.
A refill pouch of Color Radiance uses 75% less plastic than a 32oz bottle. Buy that bottle once, refill it again and again and again. As a member of Green Circle Salons, we’re happy to see more and more of our brands turn to recyclable, eco-friendlier packaging and refill pouches.
Healthy Hair is an Investment
And so are the organic, cleaner haircare products that you should use to keep your curls healthy. If all the math, the ingredient talk, and the environmental bennies of bigger bottles don’t convince you to go for the $80 curly hair conditioner next time, maybe this scenario will: If you use cheaper, synthetic-laden haircare, your curls will fail and flop and you will end up in another chair like mine insisting your hair won’t curl, or it’s dried to a crisp, or it’s falling out, or your scalp itches. And I will tell you, again, that the ingredients in your over-the-counter shampoo, conditioner and styling products are ruining your hair.
As I tell you this in the chair, I’m teeing you up for the bad news: You’re in for a series of hair detoxes, haircuts to remove damaged hair, masks and take home treatments to continually repair the damage, and more. Each service, treatment and product has a price tag. This is when you kick yourself and realize the $80 bottle of curly hair conditioner would have saved you time, energy and yes, money.
And that’s when I might say “I told you so!”