VO5's Healthful Green Tea Shampoo: Meh.

The Good: Does appear to clean (quite adequately), Does not smell unpleasant, Inexpensive
The Bad: Not a strong scent, Doesn't cut through greasy hair well
The Basics: Disappointing for its lack of a strong scent, VO5's Healthful Green Tea shampoo only cleans hair and it is not distinct in any way.


Every now and then, I do make an effort to try something new as far as hair care products. At least, I try new and different scents and styles of brands that I like. I try to reward companies that are creative when it comes to cleaning power and enduring scents and when they create new products, I do make an attempt to reward ingenuity. This is not to say every experiment is a success and, unfortunately, in the case of the Healthful Healthful Green Tea Tea Therapy shampoo from VO5, this is a study in utterly unremarkable. In fact, it wasn't until I realized just how much I love enduring scents for my hair that I realized just how disappointing Healthful Green Tea shampoo actually was.

I tend to stick to brands I know and like, even if I try their new products, and VO5 is a brand I trust. So, when my wife and I purchased a bottle of Healthful Green Tea Tea Therapy Shampoo, I went in biased toward the shampoo. Healthful Green Tea sounded good and after using this shampoo for a week and a half, I am completely underwhelmed. This shampoo cleaned, so long as the hair was not entirely greasy, and did not leave any scent on the hair. Moreover, while showering, the shampoo barely had a scent to it.

VO5 shampoos are part of an inexpensive line of hair care products that tend to be found for an average price of $1.00 per 15 oz. bottle in most markets in the United States. The bottles have recently been redesigned to be flatter instead of tapered, which makes them easier to hold when wet and I have only found Healthful Green Tea in the new bottles. Healthful Green Tea is a dark brown-green translucent shampoo that has good viscosity and is very much the a standard VO5 shampoo as far as consistency goes. The Healthful Green Tea shampoo comes with a flip-top cap for easy access to the shampoo with one hand while in the shower.

Healthful Green Tea is a shampoo, so there is no trick to using it. Simply place a dollop on your hand and rub it into your wet hair until it lathers up. Then rinse and repeat if necessary. I have long hair and I can get away with a quarter-sized dollop to clean my hair with most shampoos. I suspect that a bottle would last over a month and a half given how slowly my partner and I have been going through this.

The Healthful Green Tea Shampoo does not claim to do anything other than clean hair, with the implication of improving hair's health. This Green Tea shampoo cleans, but after a week and a half of use, I noticed no change in how strong my hair was, nor was it more manageable. As well, this shampoo did not have any conditioning properties, like healing split ends.

That said, in normal daily use, this was not a bad shampoo. It worked when I washed my hair only once per shower with the shampoo. As for that, this seems like the minimum a shampoo ought to do.

As far as the scent goes, Healthful Green Tea has almost no scent and the scent it has is pretty much indescribable. The shampoo smells like muddy water, with an emphasis on the water. The scent is light and indistinct and it did nothing for me or my partner. In fact, this was not an energizing or exciting scent in any way. Fortunately or not, the scent does not endure, leaving hair unscented. The result is a shampoo whose scent fades within moments of being rubbed into the hair. I have smelled my hair moments after towel-drying my hair off and I cannot find the scent, which (as a tea reviewer) was never the scent of green tea! This scent has no enduring quality and truth be told now that I am no longer working in a terrible factory where my hair gets stripped each night of anything remotely good smelling, it's shocking to me how quickly the scent of this shampoo dissipates without being subjected to such harsh conditions! This shampoo does not provide the benefit of a scent-memory trigger afterward!

On the positive side, it does rinse out of my hair remarkably easily. This shampoo may not lather up incredibly easily (or effectively) but it does wash out without leaving any residue of its own.

In the end, Healthful Green Tea is a surprisingly lackluster shampoo from VO5, that only cleans hair and it does that in the most basic way. For one who tends to like shampoos that actually leave hair scented as well as clean, this is a disappointing product.

For other VO5 shampoo reviews, please check out my takes on:
Vanilla Mint Tea Tea Therapy
Nectarine Orange Surge
Kiwi Lime Shampoo
Split Ends Anti-Breakage Shampoo
Passion Fruit Smoothie Moisture Milks Shampoo
Blackberry Sage Shampoo

4.5/10

For other health and beauty product reviews, please be sure to visit my index page by clicking here!

© 2011, 2009 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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