So you are in the beauty isle at your favorite big box store and you are looking to buy a shampoo. You come across two of your favorite brands that are both natural but the price for the shampoos are drastically different. Now your question is, why is there a price difference if they are the same product? The answer is in the quality and of the ingredients used.
When you pick up a product, the first thing to look at is the ingredients list. The ingredients list will tell you what ingredients and how much of that ingredients is used in the products. The higher the ingredients is on the list the more of it is in the product. Quick tip, any ingredients after citric acid in a shampoo usually the amount is so small that it has no effect on the hair.
Let’s stick with shampoo as our example. Most shampoo will have one or more surfactant in the ingredients. What is a surfactant? To keep it simple, a surfactant is what creates the foam and cleans the hair. This is one of the main ingredients in shampoo, however not all surfactants are created equally.
Let’s go back to our two favorite brand shampoo, one has decly-glucoside as their main surfactant while the other has Disodium Laureth Sulfosuccinate. Even though both seemingly do the same thing declyglucoside has more of a green profile, meaning that it’s safer for the environment, biodegradable and Eco-cert certified etc… where as the other one is not. Consequently, the shampoo with decly-glucoside will likely cost more because decly glucoside is more expensive raw material that the other.
Surfactants are not the only ingredients that goes into making a shampoo, but other than water the percentage of surfactant is the highest. All the other ingredients used will also affect the price.
The final question is, which shampoo do you buy, well, it all depends on what natural means to you and whether price or quality is more important.