Your Shampoo Was Made for an Average Head of Hair. Nobody Has One.
Walk down any shampoo aisle and the labels sort you into about five boxes: dry, oily, coloured, curly, damaged. Most people fit two or three of those at once, and change boxes with the seasons. A bottle made for millions of buyers has to aim at the middle of all of them, which is why so many people end up running a small rotation of half-used products on the shower shelf, none of which ever quite works.
Custom haircare exists to fix that mismatch. Prose, a New York company founded in 2017, is the best-known name doing it at scale: you answer a questionnaire, and it mixes a shampoo, conditioner and other products to that profile rather than pulling a bottle off a shelf. Whether that is worth paying for depends less on the formula than on whether your hair problem is actually a formula problem.
The questions are the product
The Prose consultation takes around five to ten minutes, and reviewers who have been through it say it rewards slow, honest answers. It covers the things a stylist would ask about (texture, thickness, scalp condition, how porous your hair is, how often you use heat) and several that a shop shelf never can: your diet, your stress levels, how much you exercise, and the water where you live.
That last one matters more than most people expect. Hard water leaves mineral deposits that can make hair feel coated and dull however good the shampoo is. A mass-market bottle cannot know whether it is going into a soft-water flat or a hard-water house. A formula built after asking can at least try to account for it.
You also choose things that are usually fixed: the fragrance, including a fragrance-free option, and whether to leave out ingredients you already know your scalp dislikes. Reviewers report that the formulas are sulfate-free and paraben-free.
✨ Take the Prose hair consultation
What you are really paying for is the second bottle
The honest weakness of any questionnaire is that people describe their hair badly. “Frizzy” and “dry” mean different things to different people, and plenty of us have never thought about porosity in our lives. So the first formula is an educated guess.
Prose’s answer to that is its Review & Refine process. After you have used the first order, you tell it what worked and what did not, and it adjusts the formula for the next delivery. This is the part of custom haircare that a normal shampoo cannot copy. With a shop bottle, a miss means buying a different brand and starting again. Here, a miss is feedback on the next batch.
It also sets the right expectation. Reviewers who stuck with Prose tend to describe results after several weeks and a couple of rounds of adjustment, not after the first wash. If you judge it on day three, you are judging the guess, not the system.
Who should try it
- People whose hair has more than one problem at once. An oily scalp with dry ends, or fine hair that is also colour-treated, is exactly where a one-size bottle fails and a blended formula has room to help.
- People who have already cycled through the aisle. If the shower shelf is full of bottles you gave up on, a process built around adjusting after feedback is a better bet than one more random purchase.
- People with sensitivities they can name. Being able to go fragrance-free or rule out specific ingredients is useful if you already know what irritates you.
💇 See how Prose builds a custom formula
Who should shop elsewhere
Custom haircare is not cheap, and for a lot of people it is not necessary. Be honest with yourself on these:
- Your hair is basically fine. If a mid-priced shampoo already does the job, a custom one will mostly do the same job for more money.
- The real problem is hard water. A clarifying shampoo used once a week, or a filter on the shower head, costs far less and goes straight at the cause. Try that first; if things are still not right, a tailored formula is the next step.
- Your scalp is itchy, flaking or sore. Persistent scalp symptoms are a job for a pharmacist, GP or dermatologist, not a questionnaire.
- You dislike subscriptions. Prose is built around repeat deliveries, with a lower price on a subscription than on a one-off order. You can change the frequency or cancel from your account, but reviewers note it has to be done ahead of the next scheduled order, so put a reminder in the calendar.
- You want results by the weekend. The value is in the adjustment over the first couple of orders. If you are not willing to give it that long, skip it.
How to get a useful first formula
Because everything flows from the questionnaire, a little preparation pays off:
- Describe your hair on day two, not wash day. That is when oiliness, frizz and flatness actually show.
- Be honest about heat and colour. Under-reporting straighteners or bleach gets you a formula for hair you do not have.
- Check your water. Many local water suppliers publish hardness figures online. Knowing yours makes that answer a fact rather than a guess.
- Write down what went wrong with past products. “Made my roots greasy by evening” is the kind of detail that makes the refine step work.
Then use the first order properly for a few weeks before sending feedback. Tailored haircare is a conversation with a lab, and it only improves if you tell it something specific.
