The bank holds no conditioner product photography and no shower frames, a gap the honesty section admits. The frame is the hair itself, which is what this shelf is graded on: what a formula prints, left in or rinsed out.
Checked and updated October 2026
The short version. One basis, published in full below: the record the maker prints, because a conditioner’s list is the only evidence there is, and on this shelf no law compels a number anywhere, every bottle here is a cosmetic. Vanicream Conditioner wins at 90, on an 11-item list with no silicone, no protein and no fragrance, from the one house that prints Protein-free as a benefit and is exactly right. The silicone count: named on 3 of 8 lists, each printed in the open at its position, and both houses that market silicone-free survive their own lists. The protein count: a named protein or peptide on 5 of 8 lists, placed in the first half by only two of them. The fragrance count: a Fragrance or Parfum entry on 5 of 8, outranking the headline ingredients on three. The protein-headlined men’s bottle goes home at 61, its three proteins at 20th, 21st and 25th, behind its own fragrance.
First, the decision
Conditioner is one shelf and at least four species, and this Card grades them separately and says so on every card. A rinse-out conditioner is worked through wet hair and rinsed away. A leave-in is sprayed or smoothed onto towel-dried hair and stays. A treatment mask is a leave-in with a timed claim and, in this field, a set of directions that begins by abolishing the rinse-out step altogether. A solid bar is a conditioner with the water left out, graded as a bar. And a 2-in-1 is a wash carrying a conditioner claim as its second job; this Card grades that claim, against the same bottle’s record on the shampoo Card (No. 70), where the identical published list scored 73 as a shampoo. Same list, different question, different score, and the difference is printed on the card rather than smoothed over.
The field, by species: three rinse-out cosmetics (Vanicream, CeraVe, and the prestige Aesop), one leave-in treatment mask (K18), one leave-in spray (It’s a 10), one bar (the Kitsch rice water protein bar, the solid sibling of the shampoo bar graded at No. 70), one 2-in-1 (Dove Men+Care Fresh and Clean), and one rinse-out men’s conditioner sent home (Scotch Porter). No bottle on this shelf is a drug. There is no Drug Facts panel here, no compelled strength, no printed rhythm the law required, which makes the conditioner shelf the grooming run’s purest test of voluntary print: everything graded below is there because a maker chose to print it, or chose not to. The desk makes no efficacy claim anywhere on this page, and no medical one. Claims are graded as claims; lists are graded as records.
The silicone column, read off the lists
The desk counted silicones the way it counts everything on this run: by the name on the published list, at the position the list gives it. A silicone is named on three of eight records. CeraVe prints amodimethicone sixth of 28, high in its own list, and makes no silicone-free claim anywhere near it. The It’s a 10 leave-in prints cyclopentasiloxane fourth of 26, ahead of its conditioning quats. The Dove 2-in-1 prints dimethiconol eighth of 17, and that single entry is the bottle’s entire conditioning system, a fact the 2-in-1 card reads aloud. Two houses market silicone-free: K18, whose 23-item list contains none, and the Kitsch bar, whose two circulating lists contain none either. Two of two survive. The remaining three records, Vanicream, Aesop and the skip, print no silicone and claim nothing about it. That is the whole finding, and it is a better result than this run usually gets: on the shampoo shelf the interesting cases were claims that survived only on nomenclature. Here, every silicone claim made is true, and every silicone present is printed where a reader can find it. The desk grades the print, not the chemistry, and the print on this shelf is clean.
The protein column: the name-ingredient test, one shelf over
The shampoo Card ran this test on biotin and convicted a bottle on it. Run on conditioners, the test is: where the front of the bottle says protein, where does the list put it? A named protein or peptide appears on five of eight records. Two houses place it like they mean it. The Kitsch bar’s hydrolyzed rice protein sits seventh on both of its circulating lists, the same position its shampoo sibling managed, on a bar whose conditioning base, cetearyl alcohol and behentrimonium salts, leads both lists outright. K18’s trademarked peptide, sh-Oligopeptide-78, sits ninth of 23 on the maker’s own published list, with hydrolyzed wheat protein tenth behind it: the name ingredient inside the first half, the only treatment record here that can say so. Then the shelf turns. Aesop’s hydrolyzed vegetable protein sits 24th of 45, cushioned by an itemised amino-acid contingent the copy can fairly call present and a reader cannot fairly call prominent. The It’s a 10 leave-in prints ten benefits, the eighth of which is helping to replace lost proteins, and puts its hydrolyzed keratin at 16th, its keratin amino acids at 17th and its silk amino acids at 19th of 26: the benefit is numbered higher than any of its ingredients. And the skip, graded below, markets a protein complex by name and seats its three hydrolyzed proteins at 20th, 21st and 25th of 27. The control case stands at No. 1: Vanicream prints Protein-free on its benefits list, and the 11-item list contains no protein. On this shelf, the most accurate protein statement any maker makes is an absence.
The fragrance column: scent, counted the house way
Counted the way the grooming Cards count: a Fragrance or Parfum entry on the published list, with itemised essential oils counted as the different, more honest shape. A Fragrance or Parfum entry appears on five of eight records. It sits seventh of 17 in the Dove 2-in-1, ahead of the dimethiconol that is the bottle’s whole conditioning system. It sits eighth of 26 in the It’s a 10 leave-in, ahead of the panthenol at tenth and every protein the bottle advertises. It sits tenth of 27 in the skip, ahead of the panthenol at 16th and all three proteins. It sits 17th of 23 in K18, where the maker at least itemises the allergen tail behind it, geraniol, linalool, hexyl cinnamal. And it appears in the Kitsch bar under two different names on two circulating lists, Fragrance (Parfum) at sixth on one, Natural Fragrance at eighth, last, on the other, on a bar marketed as free of artificial fragrance: the distinction is printed, and so is the disagreement about the entry’s own name. Itemised oils and no Parfum entry: one of eight, Aesop, whose scent is three named essential oils. No fragrance system at all: two of eight, Vanicream and CeraVe. They finish first and second, as their shampoo siblings did at No. 70. On this run, that is no longer a coincidence worth remarking on. It is the pattern the run exists to document.
How the scores work
Every conditioner is scored out of 100 on its published record, under the same basis the grooming Cards have used since the moisturiser Card: the active record as published, 30 (the conditioning system the list actually shows, and where its named ingredients sit); formulation honesty, 20 (the fullness and consistency of the published list, and whether competing renderings agree); claim discipline, 20 (claims graded as claims, with printed, checkable statements worth more than headline language); value per ounce, 15 (the checked shelf price divided by the bottle, adjusted where the label itself prints a slower rhythm, as a treatment mask’s dose does); and format and species clarity, 15 (the product is unmistakably what it is: rinse-out or leave-in, bottle or bar, conditioner or a wash with a conditioner claim). Nothing here is a use test. The desk opened no bottle, conditioned no hair, and treats no scalp. A high score means the published record is strong; it is not a promise about your head.
Seven ranked, and the one sent home
Vanicream Conditioner
The winner is, again, the quietest bottle on the shelf, and the pair to the shampoo that won Card No. 70. Eleven published items, the shortest full list in the field: cetearyl alcohol second, hydrogenated polydecene third, the conditioning quat distearoylethyl dimonium chloride fifth, glycerin sixth, panthenol eighth, and then the list simply stops. No silicone. No fragrance, and no masking fragrance. And no protein, which the maker prints as a benefit in so many words: Protein-free, on the same benefits list as pH balanced and the absence of botanical extracts and essential oils. Every one of those absence claims can be checked against the list beside it, and every one survives. On a shelf where the protein finding below convicts three houses of seating the name ingredient in the back half, the strongest protein record in the field is this printed absence. The arithmetic is the shampoo’s arithmetic, the same $10.99 for the same 12 ounces at Target, about $0.92 an ounce.
About $10.99 for 12 fl oz at Target (about $0.92 an ounce) (October 2026)
Buy · $10.99 at Target| Active record, as published | 26 / 30 |
| Formulation honesty | 19 / 20 |
| Claim discipline | 18 / 20 |
| Value per ounce | 13 / 15 |
| Format & species clarity | 14 / 15 |
CeraVe Gentle Hydrating Conditioner
The second of the fragrance-free pair, and the field’s honest-silicone exhibit. The published F.I.L. list runs 28 items: cetearyl alcohol second, behentrimonium chloride third, and amodimethicone sixth, a silicone printed high in the open by a house that claims nothing about silicones either way. The three ceramides the name trades on sit as a block at eighth, ninth and tenth, Ceramide NP, AP and EOP in consecutive seats, with niacinamide 12th and sodium hyaluronate 16th: the name system is mid-list and legible, the same shape this house’s shampoo showed at No. 70. The deductions are in the claims column. The maker’s copy multiplies: 10X smoother and 5X more hydrated on one market’s page, hydrated for up to 72 hours, each figure asterisked to the maker’s own instrumental or consumer testing, and the desk prints the asterisks with the numbers and grades them as the maker’s claims. At Target the bottle travels under a Gentle Scalp Care rendering of the name, $8.99 for 9 ounces, the smallest rinse-out bottle in the field at about $1.00 an ounce.
About $8.99 for 9 fl oz at Target (about $1.00 an ounce) (October 2026)
Buy · $8.99 at Target| Active record, as published | 25 / 30 |
| Formulation honesty | 17 / 20 |
| Claim discipline | 15 / 20 |
| Value per ounce | 12 / 15 |
| Format & species clarity | 14 / 15 |
Aesop Conditioner
The prestige record, graded on the maker’s current published list, all 45 items of it. The conditioning system leads honestly: brassica alcohol second, squalane third, a behentrimonium salt fifth, a second quat ninth. There is no silicone anywhere in the 45, and no Parfum entry: the scent is three itemised essential oils, frankincense, bergamot and cedarwood at 11th, 13th and 14th, with their allergens, limonene and linalool, printed at the tail, the most literate fragrance record on the shelf. The protein the copy gestures toward, hydrolyzed vegetable protein, sits 24th, surrounded by an honestly itemised amino-acid contingent, arginine at 22nd and eight more amino acids through the middle of the list: present, printed, and not prominent, and the card says all three. What holds the score here is the arithmetic and the absence of any dose defence against it: about $3.37 an ounce, 3.7 times the winner’s ounce, for a daily rinse-out rhythm. The record justifies a premium. As with its shampoo at No. 70, it does not justify this one, and the desk prints the arithmetic and lets it stand.
About $57 for 16.9 fl oz at Nordstrom (about $3.37 an ounce) (October 2026)
Buy · $57 at Nordstrom| Active record, as published | 22 / 30 |
| Formulation honesty | 18 / 20 |
| Claim discipline | 17 / 20 |
| Value per ounce | 7 / 15 |
| Format & species clarity | 13 / 15 |
K18 Leave-In Molecular Repair Hair Mask
A different species, graded as itself: a leave-in treatment mask whose own directions open by telling the user to shampoo and not condition, because, in the maker’s words, conditioner leaves a film that blocks the peptide. The full 23-item list is published on the maker’s own product page, and it is the most exposed record in the field. The trademarked peptide, sh-Oligopeptide-78, sits ninth, the best name-ingredient seat any treatment claim manages here, with hydrolyzed wheat protein tenth. The hard lines are printed too: alcohol denat. second, which the maker answers for on the same page, in its own FAQ, as the agent that carries the peptide; and Fragrance (Parfum) 17th with its allergen tail itemised. The silicone-free claim the house markets survives the list entire. The claims are the shelf’s strongest verbs, reverse damage in four minutes, clinically proven, asterisked to a disclaimers page, and are graded as claims. The value row carries the field’s steepest sticker, $75 for 50 mL, about $44.12 an ounce, 48 times the winner’s ounce, mitigated only by the dose the same page prints: one to three pumps, for four to six washes after a service, then as needed. A course, not a habit, and the desk grades the rhythm as printed without letting it close a 48-to-one gap.
$75 for 50 mL (1.7 fl oz) at K18 (about $44.12 an ounce) (October 2026)
Buy · $75 at K18| Active record, as published | 26 / 30 |
| Formulation honesty | 17 / 20 |
| Claim discipline | 13 / 20 |
| Value per ounce | 6 / 15 |
| Format & species clarity | 14 / 15 |
Dove Men+Care Fresh and Clean 2 in 1 Shampoo and Conditioner
The same bottle as Card No. 70, No. 6, answering a different question. As a shampoo its identical 17-item list scored 73. As a conditioner, graded here on the conditioner claim alone, it scores 71, and the two-point difference is the whole story of the species: a 2-in-1’s second job rests on its list’s second system, and this list has barely got one. The wash system leads, a pareth sulfate second. The fragrance sits seventh. And the entire conditioning system is one silicone, dimethiconol, at eighth, behind the fragrance, with menthol tenth and caffeine 15th as the marketed garnish. Nothing is hidden; the maker and the retailers publish the list in full and agree on it, which is why the honesty row holds and why the bottle still lands mid-table: a reader who buys it as a cheap wash with a conditioning assist is buying exactly what the list describes. A reader who buys it as a conditioner is buying one silicone at eighth of 17. At about $0.62 an ounce it remains the field’s cheapest ounce, and the desk credits it, as it did at No. 70: cheapness is not the charge. The billing is.
About $7.49 for 12 fl oz at Lunds & Byerlys (about $0.62 an ounce) (October 2026)
Buy · $7.49 at Lunds & Byerlys| Active record, as published | 15 / 30 |
| Formulation honesty | 16 / 20 |
| Claim discipline | 14 / 20 |
| Value per ounce | 14 / 15 |
| Format & species clarity | 12 / 15 |
It’s a 10 Miracle Leave-In Product
The famous leave-in, graded as a leave-in. Its published 26-item list is a real leave-in’s list: propylene glycol second, cetearyl alcohol third, cyclopentasiloxane fourth, printed in the open with no free-from claim to contradict it, and two conditioning quats at fifth and sixth. Panthenol, the ingredient the retail copy names as the key, sits tenth, behind the Fragrance (Parfum) entry at eighth. Then comes the benefit the protein finding is built on. The bottle prints ten benefits, and the eighth is helping to replace lost proteins; the proteins themselves sit at 16th (hydrolyzed keratin), 17th (keratin amino acids) and 19th (silk amino acids), the back half of the list, behind the parabens. The record is complete and nothing on it is false in the way the skip is false: the ingredients are all present, named and findable. What fails is the billing order, a ten-item promise whose protein line is carried by the list’s bottom third. At about $4.75 an ounce for the 4 oz bottle, improving to about $3.80 in the 10 oz, the spray is priced like the treatment at No. 4 without that record’s name-ingredient seat.
About $18.99 for 4 fl oz at Glamkraze (about $4.75 an ounce) (October 2026)
Buy · $18.99 at Glamkraze| Active record, as published | 20 / 30 |
| Formulation honesty | 15 / 20 |
| Claim discipline | 12 / 20 |
| Value per ounce | 8 / 15 |
| Format & species clarity | 14 / 15 |
Kitsch Rice Water Protein Conditioner Bar
The solid sibling of the shampoo bar sent to No. 7 on Card No. 70, and the comparison instructs. The conditioning base here is the strongest part of the record: on both of the bar’s circulating lists, cetearyl alcohol and behentrimonium salts lead, with coconut and sunflower oils behind them, a bar that is conditioner all the way down rather than a cleanser in disguise. The name protein, hydrolyzed rice protein, sits seventh on both lists, exactly where its shampoo sibling put it, which passes the position test the shampoo bar failed only because the shampoo bar’s fragrance sat one seat higher. Here the fragrance story is murkier than the protein story: one list prints Fragrance (Parfum) at sixth, ahead of the protein; the other prints Natural Fragrance at eighth, last, and counts eight items against the fuller list’s fourteen. The maker markets the bar as free of artificial fragrance and of silicones; the silicone half survives both lists, and the fragrance half depends on which list a reader is holding. The desk prints both. The economy is the bar format’s standing problem: $13.99 for 2.7 ounces is about $5.18 an ounce by weight, the field’s steepest figure, and unlike its shampoo sibling this bar carries no printed wash count on the pages the desk could read, so there is no maker’s rhythm to set against the weight. Graded as a bar, for a sound base and an honest-enough protein seat, with the fragrance’s own name in dispute between its lists.
$13.99 for one 2.7 oz bar at Target (about $5.18 an ounce by weight) (October 2026)
Buy · $13.99 at Target| Active record, as published | 19 / 30 |
| Formulation honesty | 14 / 20 |
| Claim discipline | 13 / 20 |
| Value per ounce | 9 / 15 |
| Format & species clarity | 13 / 15 |
Scotch Porter Nourish & Repair Hair Conditioner
Sent home. Read the published list in the order the maker’s marketing would rather you did not. The front of the house is a protein story: a kale protein complex is the collection’s named hero, the bottle is called Nourish & Repair, and the proteins are carrot, kale and lemon. On the published 27-item list, those three hydrolyzed proteins sit 20th, 21st and 25th. Ahead of them: shea butter second, castor oil third, the fatty alcohols and a behentrimonium salt at seventh, an honourable conditioning base that is not the charge here, and then Fragrance (Parfum) at tenth, ahead of the argan oil at 14th, ahead of the panthenol at 16th, ahead of every protein, followed by a roll-call of botanical extracts, willow bark, burdock, horsetail, nettle, that reads as a label rather than a formula. The conditioning base is real, which is why the score is 61 and not lower. What is convicted is the billing order: a fragrance system in the top ten carrying a protein headline whose ingredients sit in the final third. The desk also prints the record’s trail: the maker’s own store now sells this product page under a Curls & Waves title at $14, and prints no ingredient list on the page as read, so the grade rests on the full published packaging list, reported as such.
About $14 at the maker’s store; the bottle’s size is not printed on the maker’s product page as read (October 2026)
| Active record, as published | 17 / 30 |
| Formulation honesty | 13 / 20 |
| Claim discipline | 10 / 20 |
| Value per ounce | 9 / 15 |
| Format & species clarity | 12 / 15 |
The numbers, side by side
| Conditioner | Score | Species | Price | Per ounce | Silicone printed? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vanicream Conditioner | 90 | Rinse-out, cosmetic | About $10.99 / 12 oz | $0.92 | None, and none claimed away |
| CeraVe Gentle Hydrating Conditioner | 83 | Rinse-out, cosmetic | $8.99 / 9 oz | $1.00 | Yes, amodimethicone 6th |
| Aesop Conditioner | 77 | Rinse-out, cosmetic | $57 / 16.9 oz | $3.37 | None |
| K18 Leave-In Molecular Repair Hair Mask | 76 | Leave-in treatment mask | $75 / 50 mL | $44.12 | None; silicone-free claim survives |
| Dove Men+Care Fresh and Clean 2 in 1 | 71 | 2-in-1, cosmetic | $7.49 / 12 oz | $0.62 | Yes, dimethiconol 8th, the whole system |
| It’s a 10 Miracle Leave-In Product | 69 | Leave-in spray | $18.99 / 4 oz | $4.75 | Yes, cyclopentasiloxane 4th |
| Kitsch Rice Water Protein Conditioner Bar | 68 | Bar, cosmetic | $13.99 / one bar | $5.18 by weight | None on either list; claim survives |
| Scotch Porter Nourish & Repair Hair Conditioner | 61 | Rinse-out, cosmetic | About $14 / size not printed | Not computable as read | None |
Three records name a silicone, each at its position, and both silicone-free claims made in the field survive their own lists. Five records print a named protein or peptide; two seat it in the first half. Five carry a Fragrance or Parfum entry, and on three of the five the fragrance outranks the ingredients the bottle is sold on. No bottle in the field prints a percentage for anything, because no law on this shelf asks it to.
Value per ounce, in the open
| Conditioner | Price and size | Per ounce | The arithmetic, honestly |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dove Men+Care Fresh and Clean 2 in 1 | $7.49 / 12 oz | $0.62 | The field’s floor. Cheap, and the cheapness is not the charge. The billing is. |
| Vanicream Conditioner | About $10.99 / 12 oz | $0.92 | The winner’s ounce: the shortest list and the fullest absence record in the field at a mid-field price. |
| CeraVe Gentle Hydrating Conditioner | $8.99 / 9 oz | $1.00 | The field’s longest honest rinse-out list in its smallest bottle; the ticket is low, the ounce is not the lowest. |
| Aesop Conditioner | $57 / 16.9 oz | $3.37 | The prestige ounce, with no dose defence: a daily rinse-out rhythm at 3.7 times the winner’s arithmetic. |
| It’s a 10 Miracle Leave-In Product | $18.99 / 4 oz | $4.75 | Treatment pricing on a spray’s record; the 10 oz bottle at $37.99 brings it to about $3.80. |
| Kitsch Rice Water Protein Conditioner Bar | $13.99 / one bar, 2.7 oz | $5.18 by weight | A bar ounce is not a fluid ounce, and this bar prints no wash count to convert it with. The weight figure stands alone, and it is steep. |
| K18 Leave-In Molecular Repair Hair Mask | $75 / 50 mL (1.7 oz) | $44.12 | The steepest sticker on the grooming run, mitigated by the dose its own page prints: one to three pumps, a course of four to six washes, then as needed. |
| Scotch Porter Nourish & Repair Hair Conditioner | About $14 / size not printed | Not computable as read | A $14 ticket against drugstore bottles whose 9 to 12 ounces are printed on their labels; the maker’s page, as read, prints no size to divide by. |
Which one to buy
For the daily rinse-out with the cleanest paperwork: Vanicream (90). The shortest list in the field, no fragrance in any form, no silicone, and a Protein-free claim the list makes exactly true, at a mid-field price. For the fullest cosmetic system: CeraVe (83), whose ceramide block is printed where a reader can find it and whose silicone is named at sixth; buy its multiplier claims as the maker’s test-asterisked claims, which is what they are. For the ritual: Aesop (77), bought with open eyes, for the most literate label on the shelf at its steepest daily arithmetic. For the treatment course: K18 (76), a different instrument from everything above it, bought on its own printed terms: the peptide at ninth, the dose at one to three pumps, and a directions card that tells you to skip the rest of this page’s subject first. For the gym bag: the Dove 2-in-1 (71), understood as a cheap wash with a conditioning assist, not as a conditioner. For the leave-in spray: It’s a 10 (69), a sound leave-in record whose protein benefit should be read at the list’s 16th seat, not the bottle’s eighth promise. For the bar format: Kitsch (68), a real conditioning bar to buy for its base and its format. And the protein-headlined bottle stays on the shelf.
How we know: the honesty section
The lists graded. Vanicream’s 11-item list is the maker’s, as carried by the Mayo Clinic Store’s set page and the maker’s benefits copy. CeraVe’s 28-item F.I.L. list is graded as the maker publishes it through retail partners; the US bottle is 9 ounces and travels at Target under a Gentle Scalp Care rendering of the name, the same shelf-name pattern Card No. 70 printed for its shampoo. K18’s 23-item list is printed on the maker’s own product page, which also carries the dose, the skip-conditioner direction and the maker’s answer on its alcohol, all graded as part of the same record. Aesop’s 45-item list is the maker’s current published list; an older Classic Conditioner list circulates on aggregator sites with a different order and different salts, and the desk graded the current one and prints the divergence here. The It’s a 10 list is the packaging record; the house also sells keratin and fragrance-free variants under near-identical names, graded nowhere here. The Dove record is identical to the one graded at No. 70, by design.
Two renderings circulate, again. The Kitsch conditioner bar publishes an eight-item naturally-derived rendering through one marketplace, fragrance last under the name Natural Fragrance, and a fuller 14-item rendering elsewhere, Fragrance (Parfum) at sixth with the allergen tail itemised. The protein’s seat, seventh, is the same on both, and the desk graded the positions both lists agree on and printed the disagreement about the fragrance’s own name on the card. The skip’s list is the full published packaging list; the maker’s own store has since retitled the product page Curls & Waves over the same address, at $14, and prints no ingredient list on the page as read, so the conviction rests on the packaging record and says so.
The doors. Seven of the eight cards carry buy doors verified live on the merchant’s own domain on the day of checking: Target’s own product pages for Vanicream, CeraVe and the Kitsch bar; Nordstrom’s Aesop brand page for the prestige bottle, where its $57 price is printed (a re-open of that page timed out in this pass, and the price stands on the same page’s current listing as indexed on the day, with a re-check owed to the freshness pass); the maker’s own product page for K18, price and list on the same screen; a grocery product page for the Dove, the door verified at No. 70; and a salon retailer’s product page for the It’s a 10 spray, at $18.99 for the 4 oz bottle. The skip carries no pill, because the bottle is sent home. Prices are a snapshot of one shelf on one day and move; the freshness pass owns the re-check.
The photo gap, admitted again. The image bank holds no conditioner product photography, no shower frames and no bathroom-shelf frames; a fresh sweep on the day of building confirmed it. The cards therefore run text-first, the rows carrying the evidence, and the hero is a bank frame of the hair itself, captioned honestly. When licensed brand creative reaches the desk, this page gets its product frames; until then the gap is printed rather than papered over with a stock bottle.
Questions the desk hears
What is the best conditioner for men?
On the published record, Vanicream Conditioner at 90 of 100: an 11-item ingredient list, cetearyl alcohol second, a conditioning quat fifth, panthenol eighth, no silicone, no protein and no fragrance, from a maker that prints Protein-free as a benefit and whose list makes the absence exactly true, at about $0.92 an ounce. The answer splits by species. A rinse-out, a leave-in spray, a leave-in treatment mask, a solid bar and a 2-in-1 are graded separately on this page, each as itself, and no conditioner in the field is a drug, so no panel anywhere on this shelf is compelled to print a strength.
Which conditioners here contain silicones?
Three of the eight print one, and all three print it in the open: amodimethicone sixth of 28 in CeraVe, cyclopentasiloxane fourth of 26 in the It’s a 10 leave-in, and dimethiconol eighth of 17 in the Dove 2-in-1, where it is the whole conditioning system. Two houses market silicone-free, K18 and the Kitsch bar, and both survive their own lists, two of two. The desk grades the print, not the chemistry: a silicone named at its position is an honest record, and a silicone-free claim that its own list contradicts would have been the failure. There is none in this field.
Does the protein on the front of the bottle match the list?
Five of the eight records print a named protein or peptide. Two place it in the first half of the list: the Kitsch bar’s hydrolyzed rice protein, seventh on both of its circulating lists, and K18’s trademarked peptide, ninth of 23, with hydrolyzed wheat protein tenth. The other three bury it: Aesop’s hydrolyzed vegetable protein at 24th of 45, the It’s a 10 proteins at 16th, 17th and 19th behind a printed benefit about replacing lost proteins, and the skip’s three hydrolyzed proteins at 20th, 21st and 25th. The control case is the winner: Vanicream prints Protein-free, and its 11-item list contains no protein. An absence, exactly stated, is the strongest protein record on the shelf.
Which conditioners here are fragrance-free?
Two of the eight carry no fragrance system at all: Vanicream and CeraVe, and they finish first and second. One more, Aesop, scents itself with three itemised essential oils and no Parfum entry. The other five carry a Fragrance or Parfum line, and on three of those five the fragrance entry outranks the ingredients the bottle is sold on: ahead of the Dove 2-in-1’s only conditioning silicone, ahead of the It’s a 10 leave-in’s panthenol and proteins, and ahead of the skip’s panthenol and all three of its proteins.
Is a leave-in the same product as a rinse-out conditioner?
No, and this page grades them as different species rather than as better and worse versions of one thing. A rinse-out is worked through wet hair and rinsed; a leave-in spray is applied to towel-dried hair and left; the K18 mask is a leave-in treatment whose own directions begin by telling the user to skip rinse-out conditioner entirely, because, in the maker’s words, conditioner leaves a film. The 2-in-1 is a fourth species: a wash whose conditioner claim is graded here against the same bottle’s shampoo record, and whose entire conditioning system, on its published list, is one silicone at eighth of 17.
Is a conditioner bar worth it?
The one bar in the field, the Kitsch Rice Water Protein Conditioner Bar at 68, has a sound conditioning base, cetearyl alcohol and behentrimonium salts at the top of both of its circulating lists, and its name protein seventh on both. What the bar format cannot give the reader is arithmetic: at $13.99 for a 2.7 oz bar it is about $5.18 an ounce by weight, the field’s steepest, and the maker prints no wash count for this bar on the pages the desk could read, so there is no second number to set against the first. Buy it for the format and the published base, not for a protein headline the list only half supports.
Why was Scotch Porter sent home?
Because the protein story is told in the wrong order. The house markets this conditioner on a kale protein complex and a Nourish & Repair name; on its published 27-item list, Fragrance (Parfum) sits tenth, and the three hydrolyzed proteins the marketing names, carrot, kale and lemon, sit 20th, 21st and 25th, behind the fragrance, behind the panthenol at 16th, and behind a roll-call of botanical extracts. The conditioning base itself is real, shea butter second and a behentrimonium salt seventh, which is why the score is 61 and not lower. What is sent home is the billing: a fragrance system with the proteins as garnish, sold under a protein headline. Scored 61 and sent home.
Verdict Card No. 71. The grooming run continues: the hair shelf’s wash end, the shampoo Card (No. 70), the body wash Card (No. 69), the sunscreen Card (No. 68), the cleanser Card (No. 67), the moisturizer Card (No. 66), the deodorant Card (No. 65), the skincare Decoder, the hair shelf’s styling end, the sea salt spray Card (No. 25), and the Grooming Takes, No. 1 and No. 2, on the claims behind the shelf.
Checked and updated October 2026