Over the last year or two, I’ve become a bit of a convert to solid haircare bars. Unless I’m taking my tent to Iceland, I usually go hand luggage only, which means I’m limited to 100ml bottles of liquid shampoo and conditioner and frankly, 100ml of conditioner barely touches my hair. On the other hand, solid bars don’t count as liquids, weigh less than 100ml of liquid and will last the entire trip. I’m quite happy with my shampoo bar – I’m still on my original but I’m starting to use the new one at home because it doesn’t fit in the container when it’s brand new – but I’m finding solid conditioner bars a bit harder.
This is my set-up – I have a little nylon drawstring bag which I made from some leftover fabric. Inside I have a round Lush tin containing my shampoo bar (Lush’s Honey I Washed My Hair), a square Lush tin containing my conditioner bar (Natural Spa’s Lavender Lime) and a soap saver, which is a little mesh mat that they sit on to dry out before I return them to the tins. Mine is by Smith’s from Amazon and you can buy one here (no affiliate links in this post; Amazon kicked me off the programme because they didn’t get enough use).
So I’ve decided to buy a whole load of conditioner bars and give them all a trial to see if any of them work and if any are better than the “tolerance” I have for my current one. What I’ve learned before I even start is that I’m never going to need to buy conditioner ever again after this experiment.
Lush – Golden Cap (£10 / 65g)
Lush is the classic but we all know it’s expensive, so I’m surprised that when I calculated the price per gram, to take into account wildly different sizes of bar, this is joint third at 15p per gram rather than way out in front. You buy it “naked”, without packaging – if you buy in store, they’ll put it in a paper bag and if you order online, it’ll come in a box full of soluble potato starch packing “peanuts” but it’ll have to go in a tin if I take it anywhere because carrying them around naked just isn’t practical.
When I first investigated shampoo and conditioner bars, Lush was the obvious first stop. I’m still using the shampoo bar I bought that day but I never really got on with the conditioner. It didn’t seem to do anything. After a couple of years of trying out various bars, I’ve figured out how to apply it properly and after the first wash of this experiment, I’ve concluded that although I can barely feel it when it goes on, my hair is reasonably soft and manageable the next day – more than I thought it was when I first tried this out a few years ago. I think you have to get used to the fact that conditioner bars don’t lather and, to be honest, there’s no real reason to expect them too except that it feels like using soap which does and so your brain expects it.
The Natural Spa – Lavender Lime (£8.95 / 60g)
Lavender Lime has been my go-to for the last year. It’s not brilliant but it’s less hideous than any of the ones I’d tried to date. It costs 15p per gram like the Lush one and comes in a little waxed paper bag, which stood up to getting wet for a little while before finally falling apart, and mine now lives in a square Lush tin, being far too big for the round ones. It doesn’t feel very effective in the shower, no matter how I try to rub it in, but when my hair dries, I find it’s quite soft and manageable, hence picking this as the one to carry around with me.
There’s a reason this has been my go-to for over a year and hasn’t been relegated to a shelf like all the others. Yes, it doesn’t feel like it’s doing a lot while I’m in the shower. With liquid conditioner, I can feel that my hair is in better condition after I’ve used it but it still just feels dry and rough with Lavender Lime. But as long as my hair isn’t too badly tangled, it’s pretty soft when it dries. It doesn’t beat liquid conditioner – there’s a reason I don’t use it at home – but for a bar, this is the best I’ve tried so far. I’ll get another bar but now that I know how to use it, I’ll probably use up the Lush one first. But then I’ll replace it with Lavender Lime, not a second Lush.
Faith in Nature – Dragonfruit (£7 / 85g)
I’m excited to try out Dragonfruit! It’s the second cheapest of the lot at just 8p per gram and the cheapest of all the ones still available, and it’s also the second biggest. It comes loose in a cardboard box which I could tell immediately by the slight greasiness of the box and it smells really sweet, which is mostly why I’m excited about it.
It’s not very good. To be fair, the first time I used it was on hair that was matted, tangled and full of blue Radox, which really didn’t help, but when I used it the second time, on hair that needed a good wash but had been in plaits since the last wash and therefore was perfectly detangled, it just… didn’t seem to do a whole lot. Oh, I could see that I’d put it in my hair. It’s good to be able to see stuff coming off the bar and onto my hair, but it didn’t soften it at all. It wasn’t the most straw-like it’s ever been in the morning but it was a little softer than it had been when the conditioner was fresh off in the shower. I really wanted to like this but I think Lavender Lime is still reigning champion.
KinKind – Nourish me! (£8.05 / 40g)
KinKind is the smallest of the lot at just 40g, which means its price per gram works out at 20p, which makes it second most expensive to Ethique. It comes in a cardboard box but in a plasticky bag inside that – at a push, it could be waxed paper but I think it’s plastic. On the other hand, it says on the box “100% plastic free” so let’s give them the benefit of the doubt there.
And… I can’t quite believe I’m saying this, but I think we have a runaway winner! With three bars still to try out, it’s probably lost a bit of jeopardy but that’s what happens when you try things out at random and blog them in the order you did them. I really liked this one! It went on nicely and then I realised there was enough product actually transferred to my hair that I could comb it through with my fingers and get it well and truly into all the strands. It felt soft when the stuff was on, it felt soft when I washed it off and it still felt pretty soft when it was dry. Forget everything I’ve said so far – I’ll use up the Lush and the Lavender Lime and then this is the one I’ll be using for life!
Kit.Sch – Coconut Oil (£10.99 / 77g)
Kit.Sch (or is it just plain Kitsch?) is second cheapest at 14p per gram. Like most of them, it comes in a cardboard box but then it’s sealed up in a plastic bag inside the box. The bar is textured – it’s like a big u-shaped rainbow, which I think is going to feel weird to rub when all the others are smooth.
Oh, they’ve really mastered conditioner bars since I first tried them out! I love this one too! This one definitely feels good going on as well as later when it’s dry. I’m so used to bars feeling like they’re not doing anything at all while my hair’s wet that I’m going to be ecstatic at anything that feels the least bit conditioning. Bit of a dilemma now – I know which one I’m going to take travelling with me (KinKind, on account of it being nearly half the weight of Kit.Sch) but one day, when I finally get through this whole pile, which of those two do I pick as a permanent replacement?
Ethique – The Guardian (£14 / 60g)
This is the most expensive, or at least the full size version is. The full size bar is a solid cube and it costs a whopping 23p per gram. However, I don’t have a full size version. Back in about 2019, I bought a trial pack containing four minis, presumably of 15g each and all heart-shaped. There’s a little off-white shampooo, the green conditioner, an off-brown face cleanser and an off-white body butter bar in a piece of crinkly paper. The whole set comes in a cardboard box with a slide-out tray and this is part of the problem. Cardboard trays are not waterproof but I need to take it in the shower so I know which is which. I’m also aware that the tiny green heart-shaped conditioner doesn’t give a lot of surface area to rub over my hair, which probably affects the outcome of this trial.
This was another one that felt frustratingly like it was doing nothing – and yes, the tiny size of it didn’t help. I separate my hair down the middle and do one side at a time. This time, the sides were unbalanced, so it did the smaller left half reasonably well but it felt like it wasn’t even touching the thicker bunch on the right. It felt so bad and so useless that I looked longingly at the bottle of liquid conditioner staring back at me. But you can’t test a conditioner bar if you can’t report on what it was like when the hair is dry and using a liquid conditioner on top would ruin that. I can report that when my hair was dry and brushed, it wasn’t terrible. Nowhere near as good as Lavender Lime, Kit.Sch or KinKaid, better than Dragonfruit and probably about even with Lush. Definitely one to use when your hair is already in reasonable condition but then, I don’t think any conditioner bars are going to be much use for detangling a matted soap-filled mess. “Not as terrible as I remember” is a fair assessment, I think.
Alter/Native – Coconut & Argon Oil (£6.46, 90g)
This one looks like a standard soap bar – it’s just a big rounded rectangle exactly like the hand soap I’ve used all my life. This one is the cheapest of the lot at 7p per gram and it’s also the biggest bar, so there’s some value for money. It comes in a pretty little cardboard box but I’ve misplaced the box over the years. It’s exactly the same as the shampoo bar box, though, so just imagine it says “conditioner bar” where it says “shampoo bar” on the picture. Also, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to make this one work, so it’s got dented and misshapen through use. I’m not going to buy a new bar just for the pictures.
After hating this one for years, I was surprised at how good it actually is. No wonder it’s so well worn. You can kind of feel it working when you put it on – not as well at Kit.Sch or KinKind but better than Lush – but my hair was pretty smooth and soft in the morning. It’s not flying straight to the top of the list but it’s not bad. Not bad at all.
And so, shall we rank them?
- KinKind – Nourish Me
- Kit.Sch – Coconut Oil
- Natural Spa – Lavender Lime
- Alter/Native – Coconut & Argan Oil
- Lush – Golden Cap
- Ethique – The Guardian
- Faith in Nature – Dragonfruit
Well, that was unexpected. I fully expected “tolerable” Lavender Lime to come out first by far and all the others to be terrible and instead I’ve found two actual good conditioner bars! I’m disappointed by Faith in Nature – maybe that one needs a few more tries with my hair already in half-decent condition but for now, I think KinKind and Kit.Sch go very nicely at the top and I’ll be buying them again when I get through this entire pile.