Episode 338 - Can cheap drugstore hair products really ruin your hair?

Perry Romanowski (0:00)

Hi, I'm Perry, and you're listening to The Beauty Brains.

Hello and welcome to The Beauty Brains, a show where real cosmetic chemists answer your beauty product questions and give you an insider's look at the cosmetic industry. This is episode 338 I'm your host, Perry Romanowski, and with me today is no one, just a solo show today.

Valerie was actually out working, and I wanna make sure we get a show out to you this week. So I had some questions and some thoughts, so I would share those. On today's show, I'm gonna answer some questions about whether drugstore products ruin your hair, whether eating collagen can boost your skin, if there's a way to improve the appearance of skin with large pores, and a bunch of other things that I will answer. Of course, this is a solo show, but we do have the next best thing to Valerie, and that's Virtual Valerie. How's it going, Virtual Val?

Valerie (1:10)

Hi, Perry, and hey, Beauty Brains listeners.

Wish I could be there this week, but I've got my steel-toed boots on in manufacturing on another time zone. Have fun with Perry and see you next week.

Perry Romanowski (1:21)

Well, thanks for that, Valerie. We look forward to talking with you next week. Clearly, I'm having a little too much fun with this artificially in created voices. And actually, some of the questions I'll, rather than just have me talk all the time, I thought I could generate some new voices for questions that were actually sent in by readers. Readers? By listeners, yeah.

Our first question comes to us from Renata. What do you want to know, Renata?

Renata (1:56)

I use a lot of TikTok. I'm not particularly proud of it, but I see a lot of hair influencers say that if you use cheap drugstore products, you ruin your hair, that they can cause hair loss, dandruff, et cetera.

I think it is all just fear-mongering, but what do you guys think? Is there something only expensive products can do to our hair? Love your show. You're always so kind.

Perry Romanowski (2:17)

All right, Renata, I'm encouraged to see your skepticism here, and I have to agree with you. I think it is a lot of fear-mongering.

I know it's hard to believe, and we have spoken about this a lot on the show, whether the products that are really expensive are really better for you, whether drugstores are different than salons, are different than spas or dermatological brands.

The reality is in the cosmetic industry, and I know it's going to be hard to believe, but we all have access to the same chemicals. There are certainly some patents, and the big companies typically will create patents that make it harder for other people to use molecules, but for the most part, as far as the performance of products go, there's no patent that's tying up a combination of ingredients so much that another company couldn't easily knock it off with other technology. It's just very, very difficult in the cosmetic industry to make products that perform differently, or at least differently enough in a way that consumers are going to notice. You are much more influenced by things like the fragrance, the color, the packaging, and of course, the marketing story. And so that brings us to the difference between drugstore products and the more expensive products.

It really does come down to a marketing story.

If we talk about hair loss, it's hard to say that hair products, any hair products is causing hair loss. I know there have been some examples on the market that got vilified as causing hair loss. A lot of like, I remember, when conditioner, there's been a variety of them. And Olaplex, I think, recently was accused of that. And I'm very skeptical of that. The ingredients that these brands are using are not significantly different than the ingredients that you find in other hair care products. And so, when a brand gets accused of causing hair to fall out, often that is just a result of the brand being popular or the brand being unpopular or it having shady business practices, like making you sign up for a subscription and then not letting you get out of it. And with social media, you can certainly amplify your complaints and you can get it out in the world and it can get propagated throughout the world. I mean, before, when you would buy a product and you thought, oh, maybe this is making my hair fall out, you would tell your friends and your family and it would kind of end there. Maybe you would complain to the manufacturer and they would probably send you a coupon for refund or send you a new product or something like that. But that would pretty much be the end of it.