Choosing shampoo

The Good Life with Eli F.J. Tajanlangit

If you think buying a television set is a bitch, try buying shampoo yourself.

That was a sibling’s reaction to yesterday’s column about how, with a dizzying range of choices when buying a television set, the process can be paralyzing.

Somebody buys my shampoo for me,  I’m a creature of habit  -- I always stick to one, thank you -- so I’ve never really given thought at how wide  the shampoo selection has gotten.  And how even more screamingly paralyzing buying this  bath necessity has become.

There used be   only Palmolive and Pantene there, and I remember the short-lived Rave and Prell. Oh yes, there was also good old hinaki, the tree bark that our old folks soaked in water and pounded and then applied to their hair.  I’m not sure if the hinaki is now what is slowly getting popular in the organic-crazy world as gugu shampoo from the Philippines. But I recall hinaki was what the oldies and househelp used in their hair oftentimes complemented by mature coconut meat which, excuse me if you are eating, they’d chew in their mouths and spat put after the oils have been released and put on their hair. I’m sure some people still practice such hair maintenance rituals but they are for all intents and purposes already a diminishing tradition. Good Friend X, who has lush,black hair in her 40s now, attribute her great mane to the coconut oil, or hiso, that her grandmother used to wash her hair after bath. I dreaded that ritual, she said, especially when she went to school and her classmates would sniff around her, proclaiming there was some bad smell in the air.  While my classmates smelled of baby cologne, she  would recall, I smelled like day-old sticky rice cooked in coconut milk.  But now, with her  contemporaries worrying about white and even failing  hair, she proudly points out her lola’s once secret potion that she believes made her hair healthy to this day.

It was the force of marketing that drove these practices out of our regular lifestyles; how it was convenient to pour our shampoos out of plastic bottles, oh how they lathered beautifully, and how it gave us a fresh, clean feeling. Chemical shampoos, scented and bottled was definitely neater to use than hinaki or fresh coconut meat; they have none of the residues of the bark or meat.

Then they started selling us the idea of conditioners – sticky liquids that  instantly gave us soft, easy to manage hair that smelled good.

We never really looked back to those days, did we? We took the marketing men’s word for it, that chemical and synthetic were better than fresh and organic. We did not even think of the costs, how the former were more expensive than the latter; nor did we even think long-term nor examined which of them would have benefits in the long-term.

In an ironic twist, when the world wizened up to the benefits of natural and organic, we still stuck to the chemical versions, and went for synthetics like gugu, coconut milk and even a full range of fruit-based shampoos. So prevalent in fact is the use of supposed fruit extracts in shampoos and soaps that once, Good Friend  A quipped about how jarring it was to think of fruit salad while watching a soap commercial that had avocado, pineapple, peach, and papaya versions.  

And that’s how the shampoo shelves now look like in our supermarkets, like rows and rows of fruit salad ingredients, with a range choices too staggering for quick decisions. Which, oh which of these will give us good hair?

The last time I checked, there were even hair-repair, hair spa,  and pre-shampoo concoctions – potions that are meant to boost further our hair health, and, of course, raise our confusion levels several notches higher. *

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