Affiliate Disclosure

The short version

Strand & Suds earns advertising commission on product links. You pay nothing extra. No brand pays us for a recommendation, and commission never decides a ranking.

Amazon Associates

Strand & Suds is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.

In practice: when you click a product link here and buy something on Amazon within their cookie window, Amazon pays us a small percentage of what you spent. The price you pay is identical to what it would be if you had gone to Amazon directly. Amazon does not know or care which product we recommended, and pays the same rate whether you buy our top pick or something else entirely.

How the links work

Every product link on this site passes through a redirect at /go/ before it reaches the retailer. That is not tracking you — it is so the affiliate tag lives in a single configuration file rather than being pasted into hundreds of pages, which means it can be corrected or changed without touching the content.

Every one of those links carries rel="sponsored nofollow", which is how search engines are told a link is commercial, and opens in a new tab. A #ad label appears under every buy button, whether or not a price is showing.

On prices

We do not currently have verified live price data, so no price appears anywhere on this site. Buttons read "Check price on Amazon" and prose never describes a product in dollar terms.

That is deliberate rather than an oversight. A price quoted from memory or left to go stale is a small lie, and Amazon's own terms require displayed prices to be current. When live price data is available it will appear with the date it was checked, and any figure older than 48 hours will disappear rather than mislead you.

What commission does not influence

• Which product is ranked first. Selection follows the process on the methodology page, and the top pick is frequently a cheap drugstore product that pays us less than the salon alternative.
• What we say about a product. Every pick carries a "skip it if" line naming who should not buy it, including our top picks.
• Whether a product appears at all. No brand has paid for inclusion, placement or a favorable word.
• Whether we recommend buying anything. Several pages conclude that the answer is a change in technique rather than a purchase — washing less, moving your conditioner down, using a wide-tooth comb — and those recommendations earn us nothing.

If you would rather not use our links

That is completely fine and the site works the same either way. Note the product name, go to the retailer yourself, and search for it. You lose nothing; we earn nothing.

If you find the site useful and want to support it without buying anything, telling someone about it is worth more to us than a single commission.

Other affiliate programs

At present, Amazon is the only retailer we earn from. If that changes — if we join a program with a brand direct, for instance — this page will be updated to name it, and the disclosure on affected pages will say so.

FTC compliance

This disclosure exists to comply with the United States Federal Trade Commission's guidance on endorsements and testimonials, which requires material connections between a publisher and a seller to be disclosed clearly and conspicuously.

We take "clearly and conspicuously" to mean more than a footer link, so there is also a disclosure block above the first affiliate link on every commercial page, and an #ad label under every buy button on the site.

Questions

If anything here is unclear, or you think a page is not disclosing properly, write to contact@strandandsuds.com or use the contact form. Related reading: the editorial policy and how we pick.