September 08, 2004

The Hydrated Curl Debacle

I'll admit it. I'm a Pantene ProV type of guy. That's right - the really pretty-smelling shampoo that has commercials with all the hot models. And not just the shampoo-conditioner combination bullshit. No way! Separate bottles! The only way to do it. In general, I've been very satisfied with my switch to Pantene a few years ago. However, the only problem with using complicated haircare products such as those manufactured by Pantene ProV is that they actually do shit to your hair besides cleaning it, and that's where the Hydrated Curl Debacle finds its origins.

Before going into that mess, let me give you some background. Before college, I was pretty much a straight up Pert Plus, no-nonsense person. Why deal with two bottles when I could do the same thing in one? Moreover, does anyone really know what conditioner does? Clearly not. As I was moving into the dorms my freshman year, little did I know that haircare as I knew it would never be the same again.

I quickly realized two things after sharing a bathroom with floormates of both sexes: one, all shampoos are not equal - some smell way better than others, and two, women tend to have much prettier smelling shampoos than do men. Fairly soon, I began to get bitter about my shampoo not smelling as pretty and with each passing day, this bitterness developed into all out anger at the unfairness of it all. Why didn't my shampoo smell pretty!? I set out on a mission to find out how to rectify the overall inadequacy of my choice in haircare product.

Needless to say, walking around smelling the hair of random female floormates and then asking them what shampoo they used was out of the question (at the time, I was trying to live down the EECS stereotype and that wouldn't have helped matters), so I took a much more subtle approach. Anytime I was in the bathroom and a girl came out of the shower, I would mentally note the name of her shampoo bottle. Pretty soon, I was drowning in the complex world of female haircare products; weird names such as TRESemmé and Vidal Sassoon come to mind. At this point, I did the only sensible thing I could think of to parse through the complexity and confusion: I asked my sister what was a good shampoo. After getting her recommendation of Pantene ProV and testing it out, I was hooked.

The major problem that arose immediately with Pantene, however, was deciding which color shampoo to pick. I mean, there was the green bottle and the purple bottle and the blue bottle and the orange bottle and the red-orange bottle ... pretty soon my head was spinning again. I asked a friend and she told me to just get the blue bottle for my hair type (whatever that means), which I have done for the past three years. That is, until last week. Most unfortunately, I got ambitious and decided I was bored of the blue bottle. I decided to be adventurous. Daring. Reckless. I was almost out of shampoo, so when I went to Safeway this weekend, I bought the red one.

Now here comes the debacle part: the colors correspond to some random shit the shampoo does to your hair! Even worse, the red bottle supposedly hydrates curls. Now, admittedly, I have absolutely no idea what that is supposed to mean, but the effect is that it makes your hair more curly! My hair is already curly! Now it's SUPER curly. As in, it won't straighten out, no matter how much I comb, brush, or gel it. Just great! The worst part is, I still have the entire bottle to go through, and I'm way to cheap to throw it out. So now you know - if you see me with poofy, super-curly hair for the next few weeks and/or months, you'll know why - it's because of the Hydrated Curl Debacle.

P.S. - As a sidenote, I still maintain that no one really knows what conditioner does. The only reason I use it is because it smells pretty too, and why have one pretty smelling product, when you can have two, right?