Drugstore Dupes To the Test: Oscar Blandi Dry Shampoo

For lazy people like me, dry shampoo is the best. I have been a convert for quite a while. I get to not shower AND my hair gets to smell like grapefruit? Sign me up! 

However, it's been pretty recent that I've discovered my deep love of aerosol dry shampoo. Traditional dry shampoo can leave a white, powdery residue in your hair. This likely isn't a huge problem for blondes with straight locks, but the darker and curlier your hair is, the more likely you're going to find a weird chunk of white on your head the next time you go to the bathroom. Aerosol dry shampoo doesn't smell like cardamom or lavender or roses or whathaveyou like powdered dry shampoos. Regardless, it does the job and is much easier to use. 

There is some variability in price for aerosol dry shampoos. I wanted to know if this price reflected an actual difference in quality. I decided to compare dry shampoos by Oscar Blandi and GK Hair. 

Oscar Blandi Volumizing Dry Shampoo costs $25 for 5 ounces (so $5 per ounce). GK Hair Dry Shampoo costs $12.45 for 5 ounces (so $2.49 per ounce). So Oscar Blandi's dry shampoo is twice the price of the GK Hair version. 

Battle of the dry shampoos!

A quick look at the ingredients suggested that these products were very similar. Both contained butane, SD alcohol 40-B, propane, silica and aluminum starch octenylsuccinate within the first few ingredients. 

For the sake of fairness, I decided that both products would need to be tested on the same day to ensure that my hair was equally greasy and disgusting for both dry shampoos. So, step one in my test was to avoid showering for a few days. This was totally for science and not at all for laziness. 

My greasy, unshampooed head.

Next, I sprayed half of my hair with the Oscar Blandi dry shampoo and half with the GK Hair dry shampoo. When compared side-by-side, it was clear that the Oscar Blandi product smelled significantly better than its less expensive counterpart. It still smells a little funky... a bit like supermarket brand lemon-scented cleaning supplies. The GK Hair version, though, smells like car exhaust.

Post-dry shampoo. Oscar Blandi was used on the left (my right, your left) and GK was used on the right.

This comparison made it clear that I was getting significantly more volume out of the Oscar Blandi dry shampoo. Still, both products made my hair look much less disgusting.

Because it is not just about how the product looks immediately after being applied, I took a comparison picture 12 hours later.

At the end of the day (12 hours later). Again, Oscar Blandi was on the left and GK on the right.

Any volume advantage that Oscar Blandi had given my hair at the start of the day was clearly gone by the evening. Also, both sides were quite a bit greasier (though it's worth noting that this picture appears more gruesome than my hair looked in real life). This demonstrates a sad truth: dry shampoo is no substitute for actually washing your hair.

Both products seemed to last through the day comparably.

Overall, because of the more favorable fragrance and because of the additional volume boost at the start of the day, Oscar Blandi comes out on top. However, the difference isn't particularly extreme, so it's up to you to decide if this warrants the extra cost. If you already have very curly hair, for example, you may want to save your money for the less expensive version.