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Hair Stylist's Viral Video Slams Cheap Shampoo for Ruining Your Dye Job

Photo credit: Rachel Trach / Facebook
Photo credit: Rachel Trach / Facebook

From Good Housekeeping

If you color your hair regularly, you know the joys of the salon. That scalp massage during your pre-wash? Life changing. And that moment you get to swivel around to the mirror, see your new color and perfect blow-out? Just the best. But we all know what's not-so fun: settling the bill. Hair color doesn't come cheap, and after you hand over your credit card for a three-digit charge, you want to do everything you can to extend the vibrancy of your color.

The shampoo you use regularly after a salon trip is critical - any hair colorist will tell you this. Rachel Trach, a beauty salon owner in Canada, tried to make that message loud and clear in a recent video experiment she posted online that's now gone viral. Her goal: to compare cheaper, drugstore shampoo against more expensive, salon-grade options and see what happens to dyed hair.

In a video she posted to Facebook (above), Trach fills two glasses with water and adds a squirt of Unite 7 Seconds Shampoo ($25) to the left glass and a bit of Tresemmé's 24 Hour Body Shampoo ($9) to the right glass. She then dips two strands of purple-dyed hair to each glass and "washes" them. The results are a little alarming. Clearly color is stripped from the hair in the less expensive Tresemmé wash and you see the water turn a deep purple. The hair cleansed in the Unite wash, however, has much less bleeding.

"Professional salon product vs. drugstore product," Trach wrote in her caption, insinuating that "professional" (read: more expensive) shampoos are inherently better.

If you're using a drugstore shampoo, it's easy to jump to conclusions after seeing results as drastic as these. But before you toss what you've got in the shower, you should know that Trach's experiment isn't absolute and doesn't speak for all drugstore options out there. In fact, Trach's test isn't even 100% fair. The Unite shampoo (a.k.a. "professional" brand) is marketed for colored hair and formulated explicitly to prevent color fading. The "drugstore" Tresemmé's formula only claims to boost volume; nowhere on the bottle, or on the brand's website, does it say that the shampoo is safe for colored-hair or that it will aid with color retention.

We checked in with Birnur Aral, Ph.D., Director of the Healthy, Beauty and Environmental Sciences Lab in our Good Housekeeping Institute, to see what she thinks. She couldn't confirm or deny the validity of Trach's test without knowing more about the hair, the dye or the water temperatures used both times. She did note, however, that shampoos that are sulfate-free, like the Unite formula, are generally better for color-treated hair. (Sulfates - sodium lauryl sulfate and sodium laureth sulfate - are foaming agents found in shampoo that can strip away color and dull your hair's shine while they remove oil and grime.) It's worth noting, though, that our Beauty Lab has found mixed results on how sulfate-free and sulfate-containing shampoos have performed on color-treated hair.

"In past tests, we have found a sulfate-containing shampoo and conditioner pair that you buy at the drugstore that performs nearly as well in color retention as sulfate-free shampoo and conditioner pairs," Aral said.

So it's not as simple as Trach might want you to think. In the end, if you're using the right type of product, cheaper shampoos aren't necessarily less effective than higher-end formulas. Your best bet, if you're on a budget and browsing the drugstore haircare aisle, look for shampoos that are specifically created for color-treated hair. Aral personally recommends L'Oreal Paris Color Vibrancy Shampoo ($4.50), which carries the Good Housekeeping Seal.

[h/t The Sun]

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