Whatever happened to shampoo for greasy hair? Political correctness gone mad!

My wife just managed to bag the last four bottles of my shampoo in Sainsbury’s. It’s the one made by Alberto Balsam marked “normal/greasy hair”. It’s cheap, but that’s not the reason I prefer it. I (or, in this instance, Mrs. G) buy this particular type of shampoo because (a) it leaves my hair clean and bouncy and gleaming and smeling faintly of apples, thus causing women to stop dead in their tracks and follow me admiringly with their eyes when I pass them in the street. And (b) Alberto Balsam have the marketing cojones to put the apparently toxic word greasy on the damned label.

I assume the word “greasy” is toxic, because it has disappeared from shampoo bottles in the past decade. I’m pretty sure that when I was a young man, buying shampoo was easy – the label clearly stated whether it was for people with dandruff (not a problem in my case) or for those with dry, normal or greasy hair. There were other variants of course, mainly to do with waviness, grayness, damagedness, split ends, extra body etc, but we chaps didn’t need to bother ourselves with any of that. If you had greasy hair – as I do – you just reached for the bottle with the word “greasy” on it and headed for the counter. Sometimes, the word oily acted as a substitute for greasy, but that was fine – we knew what they meant. But now even oily appears to have been banned.

As a result of this linguistic squeamishness – a form of political correctness applied to hair-care products – I ended up in Boots on Thursday cross-legged on the floor peering at the labels on dozens of shampoo bottles trying (without success) to find a single one with the word greasy or oily on it, preferably in a big, manly bottle containing a clear green liquid  (if you have greasy hair, you don’t want to be pouring stuff that looks like olive oil or full-fat cream on it). The reason I had assumed the lotus position is that almost everything in Boots is located at or below knee-height, where it tends to be dark, presumably on the basis that their typical customer is four feet tall and carries night-vision goggles. Anyway, I eventually found a bottle with the word greasy on it – but it contained conditioner, which invariably makes my head feel as if it has been soaked in chip fat, so I left it there and exited the shop.

To be fair, I imagine that many women might be reluctant to purchase a product that identifies them as having greasy hair – so why don't they label it "for hair rich in essential oils"? But as a distinctly non-metrosexual male who starts to look like a wino if his hair doesn’t get de-greased at least once a day, I would welcome some straight-forward, honest labelling. Otherwise, I'll probably end up being arrested for behaving weirdly in Boots one of these days.