The bank holds no shampoo 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, spread over a scalp, daily.

Checked and updated October 2026

First, the decision

Shampoo is two legal species sharing one shelf, and this Card grades them separately and says so on every card. A daily shampoo is a cosmetic: its maker publishes an ingredient list in descending order of predominance, and nothing on the bottle has to carry a number. An anti-dandruff shampoo sold with a dandruff claim is an over-the-counter drug: its label carries a Drug Facts panel that prints the active ingredient, its strength, its purpose, and directions with a rhythm, because the federal monograph requires the print. That divide is this shelf’s version of the line the grooming Cards keep meeting. In the deodorant Card it separated antiperspirant drugs from deodorant cosmetics; here it separates the two bottles that must state a strength from the six that need state nothing but names.

The field, by species: four daily cosmetics (Vanicream, CeraVe, Aesop, and the sent-home Pura D’or), two anti-dandruff drugs in daily-shampoo form (Head & Shoulders Classic Clean, Nizoral A-D), one 2-in-1 (Dove Men+Care Fresh and Clean), and one bar (the Kitsch rice water protein bar). Each is graded as itself. The bar is not marked down for being solid; the 2-in-1 is not marked down for doing two jobs; the drugs are not rewarded for being drugs. They are rewarded, where they are rewarded, for the record the law makes them publish, which is a fact about the record, not a verdict on any scalp. The desk makes no efficacy claim anywhere on this page, and no medical one: where a bottle is a drug, its dandruff language is the maker’s regulated claim, graded here as a claim. The skincare Decoder is silent on scalp, so this Card answers to the grooming run’s own standing discipline, the fragrance-free rule the sensitive shelf already lives by.

The percentage column: the number belongs to the law

Count the field. Bottles printing an active strength: two of eight. Both are the drugs. Head & Shoulders prints pyrithione zinc 1% on its Drug Facts panel. Nizoral prints ketoconazole 1%, and prints beside it the maker’s claim that it is the only over-the-counter anti-dandruff shampoo with ketoconazole; that is a claim, and the desk grades it as one, but the 1% is a compelled disclosure, which is a different class of print. Now count the cosmetics: zero of six print a percentage for any ingredient. CeraVe’s daily shampoo carries salicylic acid, a name with a drug career of its own, at 22nd of 33 with no strength stated, because in this bottle it is a cosmetic ingredient and no law asks. Pura D’or advertises a blend of 17 herbal actives and doses none of them. The grooming run has printed this shape before, on faces and under arms: where a panel is compelled, percentages appear; where it is not, the number goes missing. The scalp is not an exception. It is the same shelf, one aisle over.

The sulfate column, read off the lists

The desk read the surfactant system off each published list, which is the only place the truth of a sulfate claim lives. Sulfate-free in fact: four of eight. Vanicream cleans with lauryl glucoside and coco-glucoside. The Kitsch bar is built on sodium cocoyl isethionate and sodium methyl cocoyl taurate. Aesop runs sodium lauroamphoacetate and the same taurate. Pura D’or, whatever else is wrong with its record, is sulfate-free in fact and claims only the narrow thing, no SLS, which its list supports. Openly sulfated: three of eight. The two drugs run sodium lauryl sulfate and sodium laureth sulfate at the top of their panels and make no apology for it, and the Dove 2-in-1’s second ingredient is sodium C12-13 pareth sulfate. Then there is the field’s most instructive list. CeraVe wears a sulfate-free claim, and the claim survives, because sodium C14-16 olefin sulfonate, disodium laureth sulfosuccinate, and sodium lauryl sulfoacetate are not sulfates. They are sulfonates and a sulfosuccinate, anionic cleansers with sulfate-adjacent names and different chemistry. The desk does not call the claim false. It prints the names in full, because a claim that is literally true and acoustically misleading is exactly the kind of record this run exists to read aloud.

The fragrance column: scent at scalp scale

Counted the way the grooming Cards count: a Parfum or Fragrance entry on the published list, with itemised essential oils counted as the different, more honest shape. Fragrance or Parfum entry: four of eight. It sits seventh of 15 inactive ingredients in the Head & Shoulders panel and tenth of 17 in the Nizoral panel, which means both bottles that carry a drug active to the scalp carry undisclosed fragrance with it, disclosed only as the single word. It sits seventh of 17 in the Dove 2-in-1, ahead of the menthol at tenth and the advertised caffeine at 15th. And it sits sixth of 16 in the Kitsch bar, one place ahead of the hydrolyzed rice protein the bar is named for, on a bar whose retail feature list calls it free of artificial fragrance; the maker describes its fragrance as natural, and the desk prints the distinction and the position, because the position is the record. Itemised oils and no Parfum entry: two of eight, Aesop and Pura D’or. Fragrance-free outright: two of eight, Vanicream and CeraVe. The scalp gets what the face got in the cleanser Card and the body got in the wash Card: a field where the absence of fragrance is the exception that has to be hunted, and the two bottles that achieve it finish first and third.

How the scores work

Every shampoo 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 (for a drug, the panel’s stated active and strength; for a cosmetic, the functional system the list actually shows, and where its named ingredients sit); formulation honesty, 20 (the fullness and consistency of the published list, and whether the absence record is printed); claim discipline, 20 (claims graded as claims, with dosed, compelled print worth more than advertised print); value per ounce, 15 (the checked shelf price divided by the bottle, adjusted where the label itself prints a slower rhythm); and format and species clarity, 15 (the bottle is unmistakably what it is: drug or cosmetic, daily or treatment, liquid or bar). Nothing here is a use test. The desk opened no bottle, washed 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

The numbers, side by side

The tie at 86 is broken on the active row, 28 to 24: the drug’s compelled 1% outranks the cosmetic’s fuller but unnumbered list. Two records print an active strength, both drugs, both at 1%. Four records carry a Fragrance or Parfum entry, two print no scent system at all beyond itemised oils, and two are fragrance-free. No cosmetic in the field prints a percentage for anything.

Value per ounce, in the open

Which one to buy

For a daily wash with a sensitive scalp’s paperwork: Vanicream (88). The shortest list, the fullest absence record, no fragrance in any of its forms, at a mid-field price. For the drug aisle, graded on the panel: the two 1% bottles split on chemistry and rhythm, not on this desk’s say-so about your scalp: Nizoral’s ketoconazole 1% runs every three to four days; Head & Shoulders’ pyrithione zinc 1% runs at least twice a week at a quarter of the per-ounce price. The desk prints both panels’ terms and chooses neither for you; that choice belongs to the label, and where a scalp is a medical question, to a clinician. For the fullest cosmetic system: CeraVe (86), whose list is the longest honest document in the field and whose sulfate-free claim you can now read with its chemistry attached. For the ritual: Aesop (76), bought with open eyes, for the most literate label in the field at its steepest ranked arithmetic. For the gym bag: the Dove 2-in-1 (73), cheap and adequate, its caffeine understood as decoration. For the bar format: Kitsch (67), a sound syndet bar to buy for the format, not for the name. And the biotin bottle stays on the shelf.

How we know: the honesty section

The panels graded. Both drug records are graded from the federal label database, DailyMed, not from marketing pages: Head & Shoulders Classic Clean, pyrithione zinc 1%, 15 inactive ingredients with fragrance seventh; Nizoral A-D, ketoconazole 1%, 17 inactive ingredients with fragrance tenth. The Head & Shoulders name covers label variants whose inactive lists differ: a circulating variant adds the methylisothiazolinone and methylchloroisothiazolinone preservative pair, and the 2-in-1 sibling reorders the system and swaps the fragrance and silicone positions. The desk graded the standard panel and prints the variance here, because a reader holding a different variant is holding a different record.

Two renderings circulate. Vanicream’s list appears in two renderings, the maker’s 15 items and a 16-item version printing both disodium cocoyl glutamate and sodium cocoyl glutamate; nothing graded here turns on the disputed entry, and the duplication is reported rather than resolved. Pura D’or’s list likewise circulates as zinc in one rendering and zinc sulfate in another, grapefruit seed oil against grapefruit seed extract; the positions the skip is convicted on, biotin 16th and argan oil 12th of 37, are the same on both.

The skip that could not be read. The desk went looking for this Card’s skip in the direct-to-consumer thickening aisle, where the biotin, caffeine and saw palmetto headline is a genre, and reports a failure before it reports the conviction: the leading candidate’s full ingredient list could not be captured from its maker’s own pages in this pass, and this desk does not convict a bottle it cannot read in full. Subscription thickening shampoos as a class are therefore rested, ungraded, until their lists are public enough to grade. The skip falls, as it has before, to the weakest record the desk could read completely. Every Man Jack’s thickening 2-in-1 was also read and rested on the strength of its own paperwork: biotin ninth of 33 and fragrance last is not a skip’s record.

The doors. Six of the seven ranked cards carry buy doors verified live on the merchant’s own domain on the day of checking: the maker’s own store, reached through its search, for the winner, whose single-bottle shelf price is Target’s $10.99; Target’s own product page for CeraVe; Target’s anti-dandruff shelf for both drugs, whose exact bottle pages sit behind the retailer’s size variants; Nordstrom’s Aesop brand page for the prestige bottle, where its $57 price is printed; a grocery product page for the Dove; and Ulta’s product page for the bar. 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 shampoo 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 wavy 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

Verdict Card No. 70. The grooming run continues: the body sibling, 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