About Strand & Suds

Janet H.

Janet H. is the hands-on owner behind Janet Media Group. She researches and writes every recommendation on Strand & Suds herself, organizing hair care by the problem it solves rather than by brand.

That is the whole of it, and the plainness is deliberate. Janet does not hold a cosmetology license, a trichology qualification or a dermatology background, and this site will never imply otherwise. In a category where half the competition leans on borrowed clinical authority, saying what we are not seems more useful than dressing up what we are.

What she does do: read ingredient lists and manufacturer documentation, work out what a formula is actually built to do, and match that against the specific problem a page is about. Every recommendation on the site is hers.

Why the site is organized by problem

Almost every hair care site is organized by product type: shampoos here, conditioners there, masks in a third aisle. That works for the people selling products and badly for the person buying them, because nobody wakes up wanting a conditioner. They wake up with greasy roots, or hair that snaps, or a blonde that has gone orange.

The sites that do organize by problem are almost all brand-owned, which means they can only ever recommend one catalog. So the gap is problem-first and cross-brand at the same time, and that is what this is.

In practice it means a page about greasy roots can tell you that the answer is a clarifying shampoo and better conditioner placement rather than the expensive thing, and a page about dryness can send you to a drugstore bottle when that is the honest answer.

What we claim, and what we do not

We have not personally tested the products we recommend. This is stated on every page that carries picks, and it is the most important sentence on this site. Picks are chosen from formulation research, and each product links to the manufacturer's own page so you can check the claims made about it.

We do not publish star ratings or scores. There is no testing panel, no lab and no long-term trial behind this site, so a number out of ten would imply a measurement nobody took. Each pick gets a role instead — the drugstore option, the one for high porosity, the gentlest of the set.

We do not make medical claims. Hair loss in particular is a health topic, and everything in the thinning and growth section is framed as a cosmetic with a clear line pointing at a dermatologist.

We do not use before-and-after photographs. We have none that are real, and a staged one in a hair loss context is a health claim in disguise.

The longer version of all of this is on the editorial policy page, and the research process is written out step by step on the methodology page.

The site as it stands

74 pages across six hair problems and a diagnostic section, every one written for a specific question somebody actually searches for. No page exists to hit a number.

If you do not know where to start, the porosity test takes about five minutes and changes what you should buy across the whole site. If you would rather browse, every page is listed in one place.

Publisher

Strand & Suds is published by Janet Media Group, an independent publisher of specializt consumer sites. Janet H. owns and runs it.

How it is funded

Affiliate links. When you buy something through a link on this site we earn a commission, at no extra cost to you. No brand has paid for inclusion, placement or a favorable word, and we name cheap products as the best answer on plenty of pages where a salon brand would pay us more. The full disclosure is here.

Getting in touch

Corrections, questions and product suggestions all reach the same place: contact@strandandsuds.com, or the contact form. Janet reads everything personally, which also means replies take days rather than minutes.

If you find an error, please say so. Corrections are made and dated on the page rather than quietly edited.