Looking after your hair is a top priority if you pride yourself on having clean and healthy looking hair, and using quality hair care products (i.e. shampoo and conditioner) is a must. However, when it comes to getting the best value for money should you buy professional salon hair care products, or would cheap high street hair care products be just as good?

Cheap hair products available from the average high street store might appear to be better value for money because of their lower cost, while professional salon hair care products often appear to be pricier, with the average salon hair products priced at $20/10, and a similar size cheap hair care product costing $4/2.

When you weigh up cheap hair care products and professional salon hair care products and compare them on price alone, cheaper hair care products seem to be far and away the obvious choice, costing 1/5th the price of salon products, giving you what appears to be 5 times the amount of product for the same money.

But when you look into this further, and take into consideration the quality and the effectiveness of the different hair care products, do the figures actually stack up in favour of the cheaper products, or are cheap high street hair care products a false economy? Let's find out?

To see if cheaper high street hair products provide more value for money in both the short and long term when compared with professional salon hair care products, we made the decision to test them both to see how each of the hair products compare against one another in a quality test.

We tested a 300ml bottle of shampoo from the high street and a 300ml salon professional shampoo. With the high street product a 50ml application is standard to clean hair where with the professional product a 10ml application was all that was required to clean the hair to the same standard.

Needing 50ml per application, a 300ml bottle of cheap high street shampoo would give you about 6 applications. But using only 10ml per application, the professional hair care shampoo gives you approximately 30 applications in a 300ml bottle. Comparing the prices, the price per application of the professional salon shampoo is $0.66c/0.33p per application, and the cheap average high street shampoo worked out at $0.64c/0.32p per application.

Result: although the high street shampoo appears to be better value, in truth there is very little difference in cost compared to the professional hair shampoo. The professional shampoo is of much higher quality and more effective in cleaning your hair. Buying cheap high street hair shampoo is a false economy. Q? Why would you want to use an inferior product on your hair?