Dear Barber Shampoo, Conditioner and Pomade

Spoiler alert: These products did not agree with my hair.

This post is about 3 products from a UK brand called Dear Barber. The presentation and imagery of this range is extremely well done.  The choices of colours, the packing materials and the Dear Barber heraldry crescent, they all convey elegance and craftsmanship from a time past.  In so many words, it totally works.  Always being concerned with the ingredients being used to make grooming products, I concluded that Dear Barber was not going the full natural route, but it also wasn’t necessarily a full on chemical party either.  For that, it made my list.

For a brand with such an interesting image and promise, I certainly was not expecting to be disappointed.  In fact, I was rather expecting to find a new love.  In many respects, when trying new products, I am very much like a 5 year old toddler in a candy store, telling myself: this is going to be GREAT!!!  In the last year, there have been a few such British brands that have certainly deserved commendations: Apothecary 87 and Johnny’s Chop shop to name but those two.   I figured I would continue on this path of rock solid discoveries and results with Dear Barber.

But things were not puppies and rainbows!  Let’s get into why.

Taking advantage of an awesome sale with our friends at The Modern Man, my Go-To shop for all British products (my apologies for any loose or incorrect usage of the term British, I mean the UK in its widest sense here).  So, The Modern Man had a great sale and I ordered 3 Dear Barber products: Shampoo, Conditioner and Pomade.  The pricing worked out to about $10 CND per product with free shipping. The Dear Barber brand had been on my radar for some time and this sale made it such that I couldn’t pass it up.  As always, The Modern Man delivered my purchase in next to no time.  OK, so: 4 business days from the UK to Canada.  Impressive!

Shampoo

The first product under test was the shampoo and the job at hand was to wash out 2-3 days’ worth of pomade and hairspray.  Going in the shampoo was smooth and felt like a superior shampoo with great suds.  It did do a very good job of dissolving the product I had in there.  It also did not feel like an overly harsh shampoo.  That was the first impression. Quickly enough though, I started feeling some resistance.  The resistance was my hair getting tangled.  The tangling got considerably worse when rinsing.  As a result, a good 10+ hairs got yanked out.

This brings me to the expectation of what a shampoo should do.  At the basis I expect a shampoo to leave my hair in better shape than when it made contact with it.  The Dear Barber shampoo did clean my hair, but since it has no conditioning properties or oils within, it caused some very unpleasant tangling which lead to a number of hairs to be pulled out.  That makes it a deal breaker!

Conditioner

Again like the shampoo, the conditioner looks the part and feels legit.  It goes in the hair nicely and all seems to be going good, until you rinse it out.  It rinses completely out leaving next to no conditioning elements or oils in the hair resulting in dry and nearly un-manageable hair again.  As my hair is fairly long on top, I usually use a detangling comb which has very widely spaces teeth.  Even with this extremely smooth comb, it was an almost painful process.  I was actually expecting to lose a few more hairs at this point.  I didn’t – thank you Saint Martin Pores (Saint of Barbers)!

The observation here is that these products don’t necessarily complement each other all that well.  Assuming that the shampoo is a deep cleaner which will strip all the dirt and oils (good and bad) out of your hair, the conditioner’s job would be to restore some order and balance.  It’s not up to the task.

Pomade

The pomade was the product that initially got me interested in the Dear Barber brand.  The faux wood jar is phenomenally well rendered and a very original offering in a world where many jars look alike.  The reviews I had seen on it claimed that this was a worthy pomade.  The difficulty here is that there are two types of pomade users: those who praise the shine and those who seek the hold.  Clearly these users were after the shine.

Before making the purchase I made every effort to see the ingredient list.  The main item was to confirm that it was in fact a water based pomade.  It was and the other ingredients looked standard enough.  Castor oil and paraffinum liquidum were listed but I figured they were far away enough in the list to not be important players.  Well not quite.  Although everything about this pomade looks and feels the part of a water based pomade, but in reality it behaves very much like an oil-based pomade.   It goes in well and you can achieve your desired style, which falls out nearly right away.  Trying to save that style with some hairspray?  That won’t work either because of the oil content in the pomade which offers a good defense against the hairspray.  It’s too slippery for the hairspray to latch on and dry.

The results were barely acceptable and I opted to just rinse all of it out and use a proper pomade, Prospector!

If you want shine and a mild to medium hold this will be adequate.  Be aware that a pomade offering shine and mild hold will often enough go under the moniker: Classic Pomade! I also suspect that it might do OK in short hair. For guys who need a firm hold, abstain.

Here is the rating on a scale of 1 to 5, where 5 is a perfect score and/or the level of shine.

• Hold: 2.5
• Shine: 4.5
• Texture: 3.5
• Feel in hair: 3
• Facility to wash out: 5

Not everything is bad and I have to state 2 positive aspects.  First off the scent of these products is a very nice and zen cinnamon like sweet fragrance.  It is done in a tamed manner and you won’t be bothering everyone in the kitchen.  Secondly, the quantities are honest and reasonable.   At 250 ml for the shampoo and conditioner and 100 ml for the pomade jar you won’t feel like you are getting jipped!

Overall, I am quite disappointed with these products as I had great hopes for them.  Obviously, the results I got might not be what you will get.  Everyone’s hair is different, but for my thick and longish hair these products did not impress. 🙁

You can shop for these products using these links: