Beauty on Your Budget: Best Shampoos & Conditioners

Rather than go on about the recession and how we all need to pinch our pennies, I would rather frame this post on how to find wonderful, natural, safe and effective products at any price. While a fairly safe rule of thumb is that you get what you pay for when it comes to natural & organic beauty products, that doesn't mean there aren't great finds no matter what your budget. Therefore, I plan to launch a series of posts that will give you some of my picks in each of three categories: budget, mid-range, and high-end. Before I do that, however, I want to make a few generalizations when it comes to making your buying decisions:

1. Pricier products usually have higher concentrations of natural and organic ingredients. Less expensive often (though not always) means there will be higher percentages of water and cheaper ingredients and may not last as long or work quite as well.
2. You will likely go through the less expensive products (particularly shampoos, shower products, and lotions) faster than you will their higher-end counterparts.
3. Your best safeguard against cheap products with cheap, contaminated ingredients is to look for certifications like BDIH, which requires regular testing of ingredients to ensure against contamination.

OK, enough of the boring stuff!! Let's get on with my picks for best shampoos and conditioners:

Top o' the line:

Shampoo - Living Nature Balancing Shampoo ($32). True, this isn't going to lather like you're used to, and you may wonder if your hair is really getting clean. I can assure that it is, and with Living Nature, it is being cared for by the finest natural ingredients in all of New Zealand.


Conditioner - Intelligent Nutrients Spray-On Conditioner. Throughout my life, I have tried and used dozens of leave-in and spray-on conditioners. Most have not provided the kind of conditioning my thick hair requires, particularly in winter. Or they weigh hair down and are only useful in winter when my hair is particularly dry and in need of serious moisture.

A solid investment:

Shampoo - Max Green Alchemy. OK, at $15, this could easily be placed in the highly affordable category. And yet, it is such high quality that it could also be placed alongside the high-priced hair cleansers. Every single one of the ingredients is natural, nearly all are organic or wild-crafted, and the aroma is nothing short of divine, for men and women.

Conditioner - Max Green Alchemy (also $15). See above. Seriously, wonderful product, unbelievably affordable. Especially when you consider that you and your partner can share!

Recession-proof:

Shampoo - Sante Velvet Rose Shampoo ($8.99). With the wonderful scent of rose, and the strengthening power of silk and wheat proteins, Sante's Velvet Rose Shampoo gives you no reason to fall back on your synthetic drug-store shampoos when you need to save your change for, say, paying your heating bill.

Conditioner - Sante Brilliant Care Conditioner ($11.99). Here's a little secret of mine: I use this conditioner more than any other in our store. Why? Because it leaves my hair shiny, unbelievably soft, easy to comb through...quite honestly, I like it better than any of the spendy high-end, celebrity-endorsed commercial conditioners I thought I'd never replace. So why wouldn't I use it?