Decent shower gel for only 10p! (Tesco Value Shower Gel)

Member Name: i_am_joy

Product:	Tesco Value Shower Gel
Date:	07/09/09 (40 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Left my skin clean and refreshed, extremely cheap

Disadvantages: Probably not as strongly fragranced as a lot of you would like, a little drying on my skin

I have been looking at this Value Shower Gel in Tesco for some time now, but it was only last week that I decided to bite the bullet and buy a bottle - in all honesty I was thinking it would probably be appalling but at least I could use it for cleaning the slabs in my back garden!

At just 10p for a 300ml bottle I had to try it as the savings would be astounding over the year if it was any good. My first impressions were that this shower gel smells much better than I thought it would, while it hasn't got a specific aroma of it's own it certainly smells fresh and clean with a very slight perfumed fragrance that I happened to find rather pleasant.

Upon stepping into the shower I began the real test. I'd been messing around in the garden for most of the day so my skin was rather grubby, then afterwards I'd done a little finger painting with my granddaughter and had managed to smear powder paint all up my forearm and (oddly) in my cleavage which had actually been covered up with a sensible blouse at the time! I was a dirty mess and needed a good clean.

I squeezed a little onto my sponge and immediately saw that it's a lot thinner than the usual shower gels I buy, however I had expected this as it was so extremely cheap and in fairness it's certainly not so thin that it drips off the sponge. In short it just seems much less luxurious than other shower gels which can cost in excess of £2 a bottle.

Washing with it you'll find that although it produces a decent amount of bubbles, the lather is thin and more like the kind of foam you'd expect from cheap washing up liquid. Again, for 10p I wasn't expecting a lather of the consistency I'd get from a more expensive shower gel but as I usually don't scrimp on shower gels I did notice the inferior quality of the foam.

Now I haven't made it sound very good, have I? But I'll now rectify that by telling you that this very, very cheap shower gel is as cleansing as any other I have used in the past. It removed all visible grime from my skin with a minimum of rubbing and after washing my body felt as clean as if I'd grabbed another bottle off my bathroom shelf. The gel itself rinsed easily from my skin and didn't leave the sticky residue I had been expecting, my skin felt spotlessly clean afterwards and I didn't experience the feeling of not being as clean as I'd like as happened recently with an Avon shower gel I had used for the first time.

I did find this Value Shower Gel to be rather drying on my skin and I did become itchy a short while after using it. I suffer with eczema and sensitive skin though and personally I found the reaction to be rather less than I had worried it would be - it was, in fact, a pretty worrying trial of this shower gel as I suffer greatly with my skin and had been very concerned that such a cheap product would cause my problems to flare up. The fact that the only problem I experienced was a dry itchy feeling was a minor miracle and easy to remedy by using a fragrance free body moisturiser afterwards, which I believe even those of you with the most robust skin would need to do after using such an inexpensive shower gel.

If your budget has been hit hard by the credit crunch I recommend wholeheartedly that you try this. It might not come in the nicest bottle in the world and certainly doesn't smell as good as I'd like it to, but for 10p these are very minor considerations. If you have 'normal' skin then I doubt you'll have any reaction to it whatsoever as despite the very low price it does seem a rather gentler shower gel than others I've tried that have been more highly perfumed and much more expensive.

Summary: Although not brilliant, I can't believe this shower gel is as good as it is.