Tea for your hair (Té Tao Shampoo)

Member Name: pussycat

Product:	Té Tao Shampoo
Date:	06/02/01 (343 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Lovely smell, nice to look at, easy to lather, clean and fluffy hair all day

Disadvantages: The conditioner is useless

As part of my dedicated quest to find the ultimate shampoo and conditioner, I recently spotted the Te Tao range for the first time. Tempted into a purchase by the 'two for the price of one' offer, I bought the 'air' variety for coloured hair.

The idea is that each of the five varities is based upon one of the elements - air, water, fire, earth and ... something else! (sorry, I can remember that the bottle said five but I can only think of four elements). In addition to having the herbs appropriate to the element, the shampoo also contains chinese tea which is apparantly wonderful for cleansing and conditioning the hair - in fact, the product first attracted my attention by claiming to be 'tea for the hair'.

The shampoo that I used was a lovely shade of green and comes in a pretty bottle - it looks good on the bathroom shelf (that might seem trivial but its all part of the quest for me). It does have a lovely herbal fragance but its quite a delicate one - not the overpowering chemical sort of smell that some shampoos have. It made a lovely lather in my hair and smelt incredibly refreshing whilst I was putting it on - in fact, the whole bathroom smelt beautiful for hours afterwards. My hair smelt wonderful all day too and was wonderfully light and fluffy. I have very fine hair so that greasy shampoos tend to weigh my hair down and leave it looking in need of another wash by lunchtime but Te Tao kept my hair feeling light and clean all day.

All in all, a wonderful shampoo.

There has to be a down side to this and this comes when considering the conditioner. It smelt just as good as the shampoo and was a sort of light pastel green colour (again attractive to look at) but it failed miserably in terms of performance. It was incredibly thin conditioner and not in the least creamy. My hair didn't feel softer and was really quite tangled. I'm sure it adds to the lovely smell of the shampoo which
I wouldn't particularly want to mix with a different conditioner but, for all the good it was as a conditioner, I just as soon not have used any at all.

This is a shame because the shampoo is so great that it will become a regular purchase but I would certainly never waste money on the conditioner again.

Summary: