Super Shampoos

The best suds for every hair type

At first glance, it looks like an unassuming three-story office building. But inside, there's some seriously cool stuff going on. Teams of chemists in white lab coats are hunched over electron microscopes, analyzing slides, and mixing mysterious cobalt-blue potions in Pyrex containers. No, they're not coming up with a cure for some exotic disease. All of this scientific activity, worthy of a Michael Crichton thriller, is about…clean hair।

Here at Procter & Gamble's Sharon Woods Technical Center, just outside Cincinnati, experts with degrees in micro-biology, chemistry, and mechanical engineering are hard at work creating a shampoo that'll rock your world। Want a mini-tour? Let's see, there's the sensory department, where testers evaluate products in simulated bathrooms com-plete with sinks and mirrors; a testing lab where thousands of swatches of hair are washed, rinsed, dried, and stretched; hot and cold rooms, where technicians keep hair samples at precise temperatures and humidity levels to evaluate how they react; and a hair styling studio, where real women test products. And that's just one floor.

At P&G, one of the world's largest hair-care-product manufacturers and the maker of Aussie, Herbal Essences, Head & Shoulders, and Pantene, shampoo is serious business। It can take more than two years to develop a shampoo--worth it, considering that Americans spend more than $4 billion a year on the stuff. "There's more surface area to clean on your hair than on your skin," says Teca Gillespie, a beauty scientist at P&G. "The average woman has about 100,000 hairs on her head. That surface area can be as big as that of a queen-size bedsheet." So finding the right cleanser matters. A lot. "Shampoo is the most important factor in how good your hair looks," Gillespie says. "It's the foundation for everything else." Translation: You can slather on a shea-butter deep conditioner and shell out $250 for an ionic blow dryer, but if you're not using the right shampoo, you're screwed.

The good news is that shampoos are better than ever. The ones our moms used got hair clean, period. Composed of surfactants (soaps) made from animal fats and plant compounds, they left a residue, didn't lather well, and tended to be harsh. Today, women typically shampoo three times a week, and 63 percent have recently colored their hair. So today's formulas contain gentler synthetic surfactants, conditioning ingredients, and more. "Now it's all about a shampoo's perceived benefits--the fragrance, the lather, how it feels on your hair, the way it pours from the bottle," says Julia Youssef, vice president of L'Oréal USA's Technical Center। "It's a little like Starbucks. It's not just about coffee--it's the total experience."

But before you buy your next bottle, know this, says Mort Westman, a cosmetics chemist and president of Westman Associates: "There's a presumption that the more expensive a shampoo is, the better it is. Wrong. There's good and bad at all prices, so don't be impressed with labels--be impressed with what it does for your hair।"

We've put together this guide so you don't have to pick a shampoo based solely on how it smells. Learn what all those words ending in -ate, -ide, and -ium really mean, shampoo myths you can wash down the drain, and the formulas our testers picked as the creme of the cleansers in the biggest WH Tests It yet. This is one science lesson that will go straight to your head.