Sally Breslin: My Life: BUYING SHAMPOO IS COMPLICATED NOWADAYS

I’ve heard that you should change your brand of shampoo at least once a year to keep your hair in peak condition. In other words, if your hair starts to look flat, it may be time to give it a shot of something new to perk it up.

Well, lately my hair has been so droopy, I look like a basset hound. And the more I wash it, the droopier it gets. No “oomph,” no shape, it just hangs there like overcooked linguini. Even hours in curlers and a good dose of hairspray haven’t helped. The minute I set one foot outside in the wind – no, make that even a slight breeze - poof! I’m a basset hound again.

So I stood in the hair-care section of the pharmacy the other night and cluelessly stared at four zillion bottles of shampoo until my eyeballs ached. There was shampoo for oily hair, dry hair, brittle hair, color-treated hair, frizzy hair, synthetic hair and thinning hair. There were shampoos that volumized, straightened, added highlights, eliminated dandruff, killed head-lice and grew hair.

And that was only on the top shelf.

Back when I was young, shampooing was pretty simple. Just about everyone used either Prell, Breck or Halo shampoo. They weren’t made for any specific hair problems in those days. They were just plain, old-fashioned, get-out-the-dirt-and-gunk shampoos.

Halo was supposed to make your hair shine so much, it would look as if you had a glowing halo surrounding your head. Prell was so thick, the ads claimed that a pearl could be dropped into it and not sink. And Breck was famous for its Breck Girl ads, which featured gorgeous women with perfectly coiffed, gleaming hair. Not one of them had even the hint of (heaven forbid) a split end.

Personally, I always used Halo, even though it made my hair feel like a cactus. I never used Prell, but my friend Janet did, and her hair didn’t look much better than mine. I guess the fact that a pearl could float in the stuff didn’t matter a whole lot. I mean, a pearl really isn’t all that heavy. If they had dropped a few lead fishing-sinkers into the shampoo, then I might have been impressed.

Men didn’t have to worry about dry hair, though. The Elvis hairstyles that were popular back then required greasy stuff like Vaseline or a special hair-slicker called Brylcreem to keep their curls and waves properly “swooped.” So the guys walked around with hair so greasy, you could see your reflection in it, while we girls looked as if we were auditioning for the part of the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz.

Shampoo lasted a long time back then because most people shampooed only once a week. We were told that frequent shampooing robbed hair of its natural oils and would result in breakage and premature baldness. And frankly, it was little scary to picture myself looking like my grandfather.

Anyway, I ended up buying a couple new shampoos at the pharmacy the other night. One was guaranteed to thicken hair, and the other said it would add loads of body and curl. Both sounded as if they would banish “limp” forever and give me something pretty close to a luxurious lion’s mane.

I tried the hair-thickening shampoo first. My hair ended up feeling as if it had been washed it in a vat of glue. I couldn’t even get a comb through it, it felt so sticky. And I woke up the next morning looking as if I’d slept with my head in my dryer’s lint trap.

So I tried the extra-body shampoo. My hair did seem thicker…probably because it was so full of static, I ended up resembling Albert Einstein. When I pulled my sweater off over my head that night, my hair stood straight up on my head. On the bright side, at least it wasn’t limp.

I momentarily toyed with idea of heading back to the pharmacy and buying the shampoo that grows hair, but I just couldn’t shake the thought that if I had to actually touch the stuff to use it, I might end up with hairy hands.

So I am $25.86 poorer and still haven’t found a shampoo that makes my hair even remotely resemble the thick, flowing, spun-silk hair that all of the models have in those television ads.

I wonder if they still make Halo.

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