Looking after your hair is a top priority if you pride yourself on having clean and healthy looking hair, and using quality hair care products (i.e. shampoo and conditioner) is a must. However, when it comes to getting the best value for money should you buy professional salon hair care products, or would cheap high street hair care products be just as good?

Cheap hair products available from the average high street store might appear to be better value for money because of their lower cost, while professional salon hair care products often appear to be pricier, with the average salon hair products priced at $20/GBP10, and a similar size cheap hair care product costing $4/GBP2.

On just this kind of price comparison alone, it appears that the cheap high street hair products are the winners as you are getting 5 times as much product for the same cost, or the same amount of product for 1/5 the price of the salon professional hair care products.

However... when you carry out a closer inspection of the differences between cheap hair products and professional salon hair products, does cheap hair care products really provide the better value for money, or is buying cheap hair products a false economy? Let's take a closer look...

To see if cheaper high street hair products provide more value for money in both the short and long term when compared with professional salon hair care products, we made the decision to test them both to see how each of the hair products compare against one another in a quality test.

We tested a 300ml bottle of shampoo from the high street and a 300ml salon professional shampoo. With the high street product a 50ml application is standard to clean hair where with the professional product a 10ml application was all that was required to clean the hair to the same standard.

Using 50ml per application, the average high street hair shampoo provides approximately 6 applications per 300ml bottle. With just 10ml used per application, the professional salon hair shampoo gives you around 30 applications per 300ml bottle. Doing a little math, the cost per applications are $0.64c/GBP0.32p for the cheap high street shampoo, and $0.66c/GBP0.33p for the salon professional shampoo.

Conclusion: although cheap hair care products initially seem a better deal and provide more value, in reality there is virtually no difference in price when it comes to the economics of professional salon hair care products. And? when you include the much higher quality, the greater effectiveness and visual results, and the deeper and more thorough cleansing and conditioning of salon hair care products, buying cheaper high street hair products in favour of salon hair products is a complete false economy.