Skip to main content

Inventing a better shampoo

Invent a better mousetrap, it used to be said and they will beat a path to your door. (Whoever they are.) But what about a better shampoo? I'm not sure.

When I worked at British Airways, I had someone called Chris Brown in my team a couple of times. He was (and still is) a great programmer with a laid back attitude. You can tell he was laid back because when we once made a little movie to illustrate the differences between the PC operating systems, with different individuals playing, say, Windows and OS/2 (yes, it was that long ago), Chris played the part of Unix. (And yes, weren't we wacky if geeky folk, for making such a movie? One day I will get it on YouTube, but it's 8mm cine film, so non-trivial.)

At one point Chris had quite long hair and made a strong argument that the companies making new shampoo products were doing so for their own benefit, rather than the benefit of their customers. At the time, some brand or other was proudly announcing you could wash your hair every day with their product, without causing any damage. This, Chris pointed out, entirely missed the point. What would be a real breakthrough would be a shampoo that meant you only had to wash your hair once a month or once a year.

After all, shampooing is not fun. It's not clever. It's something you have to do to avoid moss growing and to keep things looking vaguely acceptable. It's a chore, not a pleasure. You can see why the manufacturers haven't gone down this route. They want to sell more shampoo, not less. But if you make a product that plenty of people want, surely it would be worth it? How about it, shampooistas? Hit the labs, please.

Image from Wikipedia
Labels:

Comments

  1. cromercrox21 September 2010 at 14:18

    Shampoo is a con. I know someone who works for a big company that makes it, and he says it's all the same stuff. Sure enough, when you look at the labels they seem to contain 'aqua' (no prizes there) and 'sodium laureth sulfonate' which the horny-handed local in me translates as 'detergent'. Therefore the ultra-cheap 49p Morrison's Own Brand works just as well as a poncey product costing many times more. I can't imagine how the beauty-products industry gets away with the pseudo-sciencey claptrap on TV adverts...

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp
117 comments
Read more

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor
25 comments
Read more

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense
6 comments
Read more