Pump it up

You have to stick with the things you know.

When it comes to hair care products, I am largely indifferent to the plusses and minuses of various shampoos, conditioner, gels, creams, tinctures, infusions, treatments or other seemingly arcane practices used to keep people’s hair looking nice.

I suspect this is something shared by most guys. While I am sure there are plenty of women who also share in this blissfully simplistic approach to regular hair maintenance needs, in my personal experience this hasn’t been the case. The number, shape and sizes of various bottles promising grand results with exotic ingredients, is an ever-growing crowd in my home’s shower and bathroom counter.

I suspect that I am similar to most guys in that at some point in time we started using a particular brand and style and just get more of the same until the company discontinues that line. It is annoying when companies discontinue a shampoo line because it forces us to find some other option to carry us for the next decade.

Shampoo bottles are a wonderful lesson in how resource conservation efforts work in the real world. When you have a brand new bottle of shampoo, you are generous in pouring it, not worrying if some spills. Instead of the dime-sized portion your stylist or spouse told you was all that was needed, you may use a quarter or even half-dollar sized dollop. Over the next few weeks as the level of shampoo in the bottle gets lower, you become more concerned about conserving what is left. As the bottle gets emptier and emptier, your conservation efforts get more extreme. At some point you unscrew the lid and add some water from the shower head and shake it around to get all the shampoo that might have been clinging to the insides of the bottle until you get every useable precious drop of shampoo. If you are lucky this will coincide with someone remembering to buy more shampoo.

Otherwise you will need to resort to the old reliable method of using the bar of soap on the shelf to wash your hair or in the most dire of circumstances dare to use any of your spouse’s daunting collection of bottles. The inherent risk of using any of your spouse’s hair care products is that she WILL know and there WILL be consequences.

After more than 25 years of marriage, my solution is to prevent this situation by maintaining a stockpile. I try to keep about six-months supply in my strategic shampoo reserve, but depending on cupboard space under the sink, your particular circumstances may be different.

This gets me to my most recent showering dilemma. While there are certain physical limitations to the size of bottle a person can keep on a narrow, slippery shower shelf, when I am shopping I will generally attempt to get the largest possible bottle — not quite as insane as the gallon jugs of Dawn dish detergent — but along those same lines.

Due, I am sure, to the comically large size of the shampoo bottle it came with a pump-head attachment. While sheer volume of the contents and the per unit price, were the driving influencers in my purchasing decision-making process, I remember thinking that the pump would come in handy. In theory by using a pump I would get a measured amount of shampoo and I wouldn’t have to blindly be groping to put a slippery bottle of shampoo back on a narrow shelf and therefore reduce the likelihood of missing and having it land on my big toe instead.

I was quite pleased with myself over my efforts to minimize waste and avoid shower mishaps. What I didn’t take into account is needing an engineering degree in order to figure out how to release the pump from its locked position and be able to actually use it for its intended purpose. For something that should be intuitive, this is proving to be a daunting task. It is made harder because like most sane people I don’t wear my glasses in the shower and I forget to check for instructions between showers. So far I have resorted to unscrewing the lid and using the pump body to scoop out shampoo like a poorly designed honey dipper.

As workarounds go, it is less than ideal and the chances of a mishap involving a heavy bottle of shampoo and my big toe is substantially higher than my comfort level. The clear lesson here is that I should have kept to the status quo rather than be lured by technological innovations that failed to deliver on their promise of making life easier.

Brian Wilson is News Editor at The Star News.