Opinion: When is a Shampoo not a Shampoo?

When is a shampoo not a shampoo? When it cleans, apparently, according to a beauty piece in Vogue which delivers the earth-shattering news that it may be the ‘end of shampoo’. According to British Vogue website, there is a new trend for ‘anti-shampoos’. This ‘new wave’ of anti-shampoo’ is built on flimsy ground and seems to me - and forgive me if I'm allowed a little rant here - to sum up everything that is wrong not only with the beauty industry and the vast bulk of women’s magazines, but our entire civilization.

We are awash with marketing speak. We buy products we don’t need to tackle problems we don’t have. It reminds me of the old Grouch Marx joke about politics being “the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.” The problem with this new trend for anti-shampoo is that it isn’t a trend and it isn’t an anti-shampoo. Apparently, it’s a ‘cleanser’. Granted, I may not be up on the finer nuances of shampoo-ery (I never did it at school) but surely, if it cleans hair, ergo, it is shampoo? Apparently, this new un-shampoo is brilliant, however, because “normally, people would spend money on a shampoo, a conditioner and a mask. With this you just need one product, no matter what your hair type. It's very liberating.” This is news for people like me who literally ‘just wash and go’, but the piece goes on, displaying some dazzling Lewis Carroll-style wordplay that even Foucault would be proud of (‘it’s not what it does, but what it doesn’t do,” says the product’s founder, cryptically), until you are left with the bone-shaking realization that the product’s main USP is that it doesn’t froth. Apparently, this is “the very crest of a sea change. Last year, Shu Uemura Art of Hair Cleansing Oil Shampoo rewrote the rule book on how we perceive shampoo.” The real lesson for me about this ‘crest’ of enlightened non-lathering, anti-shampoo wearers is that we have truly reached a point where brand management consultants can peddle all kinds of rubbish and there will be an audience gullible enough for it wash. Surely we should be educating our children to see through such duplicitous marketing-speak? Exam papers should be set encouraging our teenagers to scrutinise the kind of nebulous hoodwinkery that is hurled at us on a daily basis. (Is there any real scientific definition of the word ‘anti-peptides’? Discuss.) Most of the words on beauty products contain no scientific definition. There is no plausible evidence that any of it works, but we live in a world so riddled with marketing speak, we can rebrand a shampoo a revolutionary cleansing cream and somehow get away with it.

#shamppoo