Over a week ago, I bought a bottle of el-cheapo shampoo for $3. It's called White Rain (see here), and it's truly godawful crappy stuff. The net effect of washing with White Rain is little different from washing your hair with a bar of low-quality soap: all your natural oils are flushed away, leaving your hair artificially squeaky. But the weirdest thing about White Rain is its consistency, which is almost identical to snot: when you squirt some of the shampoo into your palm, then release the bottle, the shampoo is so snotlike that it allows itself to get sucked most of the way back into the bottle. I've never seen shampoo behave like that before, but it's reminiscent of the sort of thick mucus that pops out of your nose when you've got a bad cold-- the kind of gunk you can suck back into your head without leaving a trace on your upper lip.
And that's my shampoo for the next few weeks. Can't say that I'll be buying White Rain ever again. Besides, the brand name has too much of a creepy bukkake vibe. Would a woman really want to find herself drenched by white rain?
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Several years ago, ABC's news magazine, "20/20," featured a segment on the "high cost" of shampoo. They focused on the female swim team at Stanford as their hair is subject to several washings and harsh chemicals every day.
ReplyDeleteIn the end, cheap Suave shampoo ended up being the winner in their somewhat scientific survey while most of the expensive high-end brands were nothing more than fancy "snake oil." Luckily, you can still get it for a dollar or two today.
White Rain comes from my childhood--"Use new White Rain shampoo tonight, and tomorrow your hair will be sunshine bright."
ReplyDeleteI am surprised you have lived so long and not been exposed to it. I tried it about thirty years ago and never again.
I do disagree with the previous commentor that high-end brands are snake oil. I have used cheap brands, motel brands, and a number of higher-end brands. I can tell the difference. It may be that there is little difference among the high-end brands, but I can definitely tell the difference between them and low-end brands, including the difference between motel brands. One of the more notable things is that it takes far less good shampoo to do the job than cheap shampoo.
As an historical note: White Rain got its name from the fact that water was usually quite hard, especially on farms with wells. People had either cisterns or rain-barrels to capture rain water from their house roofs to wash hair and sometimes other things, depending on the abundance of the supply. The name appealed to those from the country or in cities with hard water. The bukkake reference is very modern but very a propo.
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