Travel haircare

The best shampoo & conditioner to take travelling

Why a solid bar the size of your palm outlasts every bottle in your bag, and what's really going on inside that little travel shampoo.

Silky Bars · 4 min read

You pack a bottle of shampoo. A week into the trip, it's empty. So you buy another one at an overpriced shop near your hotel. In a scent you don't even like.

Here's the part nobody tells you: it was never going to last. Not because you used too much. Because of what's actually inside the bottle.

The real reason travel shampoo runs out so fast

Pick up any bottle of liquid shampoo and read the ingredients. The very first one, almost every time, is water. Most liquid shampoo is around 70 to 80% water.

That watered-down mix barely cleans per pump, so you squeeze out more every wash to build a proper lather. The bottle empties quickly, and a little travel bottle is lucky to last a week.

The fix: a solid shampoo bar

So we made a travel shampoo and conditioner that leaves the water out completely: a solid bar.

Take the water away and what's left is the part that actually cleans your hair, pressed into a bar the size of your palm. The cleansers are the same gentle kind used in mild everyday shampoo, just concentrated instead of watered down, so a small amount lathers up, does the job, and keeps going for months.

What "mostly water" really costs you

The water doesn't just take up space in your bag, it costs you money too.

A travel mini runs out in about a week, so on a two or three week trip you end up buying two or three of them, each one last-minute, at tourist prices, in whatever scent happened to be on the shelf.

Our bar works out to about 20 cents a wash. One bar lasts 60 to 80 washes, which is two to three months of daily washing for most people, so a single bar covers your whole trip and usually the next one too.

How months of shampoo fits in your carry-on

Here's the part that surprises people. Pour liquid shampoo into the little tin our bar comes in and it fills up in seconds, giving you maybe a week of washes.

Now put our solid bar in that same tin. Same size, same space in your bag, but instead of a week it lasts up to 80 washes. That's your whole trip sorted, in something that fits in your palm.

No liquid limit. No leaks. No bulk.

Because it's solid instead of liquid, a few travel headaches just disappear:

• Straight through security. No liquid limits to think about. It goes in your carry-on and stays there.
• No leaks. It lives in a watertight tin, so it can't spill through your bag at 30,000 feet.
• Barely any weight. It weighs less than a bottle and takes up almost no room, so there's more space for everything else.

Now in scents made for your hair type

We've just launched new scents, each matched to a different hair type, from an argan oil bar to a violet toning bar for blonde and grey hair. They're moving fast. If one sounds like your hair, grab it before the scent you want sells out.