Best shampoo for colored hair: 60 washes is not 60 days

Two bottles with the same number that do not mean the same

Here is what came out of putting the eight labels in one table.

On their US pages, two of these shampoos print the number 60, and there is almost double the distance between them.

• One promises up to 60 washes, with no condition beside it. No asterisk, no test cited, nothing.
• The other promises up to 60 days, and its small print explains exactly what that means: four washes a week, using its shampoo with its conditioner.

Do the maths and those 60 days are around 34 washes. Anyone comparing the two labels on the shelf thinks they are comparing the same thing, and they are comparing one figure with almost double another.

The interesting part is not which one wins, it is which one can be checked. One of the two gives you everything you need to verify it. The other gives you a round number and nothing else.

And the 60-day shampoo is L’Oréal’s Elvive Color Vibrancy. Its other formula, Color Vive, prints up to 40 washes, with a note about a test with its shampoo and mask after five applications. Same Elvive, another figure and another bottle in the test: check which one you are holding.

Three of these figures are not for the shampoo alone

And this repeats across the whole category, not in one odd case.

Of the four bottles that give a figure, three tie it to another bottle from their line. One talks about the system of shampoo and conditioner, and in its other formula about shampoo and mask; another gives its figure “when used with” its conditioner; the third talks about a test after applying shampoo and conditioner.

And there is another that gives no figure but does explain its claim: it measured it with the shampoo plus a mask. Its line about smoother hair was measured with three products at once.

You buy one bottle and the number comes from two, sometimes three. That is not abusive small print, it is normal in cosmetics. But nobody tells the buyer, and it explains “it did not last what it said” better than anything else.

Very hot water takes more color out than whichever shampoo you use.

”Safe for colored hair” is not the same as “protects color”

This is the point that earns this page its place, and the one that costs most to ignore.

Two of the eight, among the most expensive and best known, promise absolutely nothing about how long your color lasts.

• One only says it is safe for colored hair. All its figures are about repair and breakage.
• In the other, the word color does not appear once among the benefits on its page. It only turns up in its question section, to say it is safe for color treated hair.

Safe means it does not spoil it. Preserving it is another thing. The industry sells the two as if they were one, and there are “best for keeping your color” lists that include products whose own maker says no such thing anywhere.

It does not mean they are bad shampoos. It means that if your problem is color going, those two are not built for that.

Three of the eight carry sulfates

In a category where the most searched thing is exactly the opposite.

Five state they carry none. Three do carry them, and two of those three publish it on their own ingredient list, which is the honest way.

The case worth telling separately: one of these brands publishes an article of its own recommending you choose sulfate free products, and for the shampoo it recommends in that same article, the list it used to publish itself in another country included two. Today that list no longer appears on that country’s page or on the US one.

And a reading trap, so nobody uses it backwards: one of the shampoos that does not carry sulfates has a salt on its list with that word in the name. It is not a surfactant, and it contradicts nothing. Anyone flagging it as a gotcha has misread it.

What this page is not

We have not tested these shampoos. We have no lab and no test panel, and none of the eight brands publishes a measurement you could compare against the others on equal terms.

What we did is read the eight official pages, small print included, and put them side by side. Out of that comes what this page knows: the figures on this shelf cannot be compared with each other, because each was measured with a different ruler.

And the thing no label has room for: how long your color lasts depends mostly on what color went on, and on what hair. A tone far from your base fades sooner whatever your shampoo does. The person who colors it knows that, and that conversation is worth more than any of these eight bottles.