Physique shampoo

Physique shampoo has a gimmick. It's not a witches'-brew botanical extract or secret ingredient with a trade name that sounds like an amino acid. It's not even unique to shampoo.

	PHYSIQUE SHAMPOO: A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE Prologue: I normally shower with Pert Plus. It's a delightful gooey grade of green, and after I shower with it, women seem to like touching my hair. But it's important to have a man's perspective on shampoo, too. Logue: After taking off my clothes, I stepped into the shower. I put the Physique in my hand, only to be surprised by its odor, one that was remiscent of melted Gobstoppers or an accident at the perfume sample table. Plunging ahead, I put it in my hair. The bottle said nothing about conditioner, so I skipped that step. Should I have used conditioner? This haunts me to this day. After I was done showering, the faint smell of burnt unicorn lingered in the air. Epilogue: My hair lacks its normal subtle texture and pliable nature. I do not like this new shampoo, despite its shiny bottle. To hell with it, and any grooming products that share its sickly scent. —James Norton

Physique's gimmick is that it is very expensive.

A 10-ounce bottle of Physique costs $7.99. That's about as much as hair-salon shampoo, but Physique is a drugstore brand. Why would anyone pay $7.99 for drugstore shampoo?

Your question may be, why would anyone pay $7.99 for shampoo? As I've (rarely) done so, let me attempt to answer it.

First of all, salon shampoo looks much better. It tends to come in packaging that's very simple, very elegant or very self-aware (witness the "Bed Head" line of products.) It also tends to smell better, less like cheap perfume and more like something you'd want your hair to smell like. Finally, it may actually be better. All shampoo is detergent, sure, but if there were really no difference, would Consumer Reports bother to put out ratings?

Physique has none of these advantages.

It is clear. It smells like the tiny scented plastic sprite-like charms manufactured by Coleco or Hasbro in the early 1980's, whose name I can no longer remember. It claims to be "virtually weightless" but it's about as heavy as most shampoo, which, to be fair, is not all that heavy. Its cylindrical bottle looks very much like Pantene's before its design changed, except that it's printed with a pale blue sigma. And, judging from the way my hair came out after washing with it, one might conclude that the sigma stands for the summation of oily and flyaway. Or maybe limp and frizzy.

But one would be wrong. According to Physique's online FAQ, "The Physique sigma (S) is simply used to reinforce the strong science of the brand." This science, they say, explains why my shampoo is clear: "The new weightless formula has only the essential ingredients you need for building volume in your style. You can notice the change by the shampoo's new clear appearance rather than a creamy, white appearance." And it also involves "a positively charged style enhancer, which work[s] with your negatively charged hairs to build air pockets between the strands." Right, because positive and negative repel.

Leaving aside the problem of magnetic poles, the obvious question is, who's buying this stuff? Many drugstore brands attempt to emulate salon brands, but none seems to have taken the bold extra step of offering matching prices, until now. We already know that the practice appeals to independent Web magazine reviewers, but they're probably hoping to attract a wider audience. So is it aimed at the salon-shampoo consumer who wants to buy something similarly priced but less appealing? Or is it meant for the drugstore-shampoo consumer who just feels like spending more?

What the people at Procter and Gamble (that's who makes Physique) don't realize is that consumers of expensive shampoo have serious brand loyalty, or at least salon loyalty, and also that pseudoscience advertising went out with Clinique's "computer" that Susan Faludi so aptly pointed out was "more like a Fisher-Price Busy Box than a Macintosh." Your customers know you're bluffing, so the thing now is to be subtle. Be wry. Undersell your product, even. For Physique, that's going to be tough.

— Julia Lipman (julia@flakmag.com)