Conditioner Is By Far the Best Buy In the Toiletries Aisle

By Terry Engram

TOLEDO- More often than not, when I run out of a bathroom necessity, I become irrationally annoyed, bordering on maniacal. Toothpaste tortures you for weeks before finally running out. You can squeeze from the bottom, roll up the tube, scrape just enough off of the side of the nozzle to brush your teeth, or even resort to fishing out a pair of pliers to forestall the new tube for one more day. Floss is even worse because you never know when it’s about to run out, so you spend a month wondering when it will finally spin off of the center wheel, leaving you with enough to thread between your teeth and wrap around one finger, but not both, so it slips off your fingers every time you move to a new tooth. Then you’re left with the dilemma of rearranging the next day around a trip to the store or waiting until the next grocery run and letting your gums swell up so bad that you bleed like a hockey player by the time you finally have some floss. The worst of all may be contact solution. It always feels like you have about a week left when you hear that sickening sucking noise where the last bit of solution turns to obnoxious bubbles. What are you supposed to do at that point, spit it in the contact case? Sleep in your contacts? If you use tap water, the chlorine will make your eyes feel like a six year old’s urine decomposing in a public pool. Then you go to the store and the cheapest bottle of solution is $9 for the size of a can of Coke. The store brand of “saline” solution is $2.50, but there must be some reason it’s so much cheaper, and since we’re talking about eyes, the prospect of going blind is enough to make me spend the extra money, but not enough to make me feel good about it.

But there is one toiletry that doesn’t make me want to strangle domestic pets when I have to buy a refill. In fact, the contrast between the value of this toiletry and all others makes me feel perversely satisfied every time I get in the shower. The toiletry to which I am referring, of course, is conditioner. A bottle of conditioner costs about $1.19 and it lasts for three or four months. You can see through the translucent bottle, so even though you use the conditioner every day, you know exactly when you’re about to run out. It makes your hair feel great after you use it, your hair looks better, and it is more manageable, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Buying a good conditioner is not a given, though. It takes careful planning and decisive action to get the right conditioner. For one, if you’re not careful, you could end up with some fruity smelling conditioner that will make everyone in your office wonder why your desk smells like the body spray that you get at Claire’s. I call this problem the “Passionfruit Sunrise Dilemma.” Personally, I usually go with more of a subtle, neutral scent, something along the lines of vanilla or coconut. Also, not everybody is going to use the same kind of $1.19 conditioner that works so well for me. If you’re using my bargain bin Suave and you look like Crystal Gayle, you’re probably going to end up looking like Cousin Itt met the business end of an electrical socket.

[RIGHT- Crystal Gayle provided hair care inspiration to hundreds of home-schooled children nationwide.]

Those 2-in-1 shampoo + conditioner combos don’t even get a foot in the door. Seriously, they suck worse than Andy Dick at a Jonas Brothers concert after downing three Mike’s Hard Lemonades. My God, can you image the hangover you would get if you just drank Mike’s Hard Lemonade all the time? They should make a special express lane at IHOP for those people, because I don’t think the rest of the world even wants to see what that hangover looks like. If I was in that position, I might feel the same way about those econo-size jugs of Tylenol from Costco as I do about conditioner.

But I digress. My point is that 2-in-1 shampoo + conditioners do not clean nor condition your hair. It’s like they just put random leftover sludge in the bottle, like the hot dog of hair care products. If your hair is too dry, you assume there’s too much shampoo. If it’s too oily, you assume there’s too much conditioner. Either way, there’s nothing you can do other than throw away the last 97% of the bottle and hope you do better the next time. You can’t always consolidate two steps into one to speed things up. You can’t stretch and run at the same time without falling down and eating shit. You can’t cook dinner and wash the dishes together without soaping up your food and getting dysentery. And you can’t eat and drink simultaneously without choking; I’ve tried- it’s a complete disaster.

I guess when it comes down to it, Billy Madison was onto something when he pointed out just how valuable conditioner really is. No matter what havoc is going on in my life, I can take comfort in knowing that every morning, I can get in the shower and see a translucent beacon of precious efficiency that will never let me down. And that is why conditioner is undoubtedly the best buy in the toiletry aisle.