Fish Shape Texturising Cream – Direct from Soho London
In this post we will be reviewing pomade, well actually a cream, from a British company called FISH. They originated from the cool and creative SOHO district in London in 1987. Under the FISH brand name you will find a full hair product line as well as a string of Barber Shops. In other words, proper credibility!
This jar was picked by my traveling friend who was recently in London. Actually, he was switching planes in London to return to Canada from Portugal and he managed to find some time and a pharmacy with pomades and picked up a few jars. Now that’s a friend. Thanks Buddy!
Test Time: It’s straight out of the shower with towel dried hair. I took a small finger scoop of this cream. It is very smooth and needs next to no relaxing in the palms. In that sense this stuff really is a “Cream”, not liquid and clearly not thick pomade. Application was simple as this product is spreads easily. No trouble covering all the hair and distributing it evenly. I styled my hair in its usual fairly elevated fashion and went down for breakfast. At this point the hair was nice and shiny and had good height. By the end of breakfast, the hair had started to curl a bit and the height was dropping. The shine on the other hand was unchanged. I opted to try and lock some of the height in place using hair spray. This worked quite well for about 2-3 hours after which the curls made their way back.
This product offers great shine and a moderate hold (placement). If you are simply after a slick back, this will be a perfect product. If on the other hand you are after a pomp, by itself it will not give the necessary hold and height. But combined with a hair spray, it will do much better, although not for the whole day. I found that combining hair spray with Fish was not as hard on the hair as some other fixatives. Hair spray has a strong alcohol content which dries out the hair. The Fish cream has a high “petrolatum” content (2nd ingredient) which is greasy and thus protects your hair from the alcohol. Granted, the greasy element also prevents the hair spray from adhering at its maximum capacity and thus not offering a full day worth of hold, but this combination would be quite sufficient for a 2-4 hour event.
Although the product has a high content of “grease”, the feeling is quite moderate and not slimy or disgusting. In fact it makes the hair very soft to the touch.
Coming back to the ingredient list, as mentioned petrolatum is in second position. Honestly I was worried about that since this ingredient has generally been synonymous to a challenging product removal thereafter. I was totally surprised to find out that washing this cream out the next morning was nearly as easy as washing out regular water based pomade.
On pricing, the Fish products are completely affordable at some 5 British pounds or $10 Canadian dollars. Sadly, their site only offers UK delivery so unless you have a UK connection this stuff is not readily available. That being said, I found most of the red Fish product line on amazon.com
As an amusing side note, Wolverine uses the “Superfish” line.
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: 2
- Texture: 4
- Feel in hair: 4
- Facility to wash out: 4.5
Use the below links to shop for this product:
