Sending us a hair photo on WhatsApp
What Shalini asks when you send a photo, what she can and cannot tell from it, and what the routine she sends looks like.
What goes into a ₹495 bottle of hair oil
Leaves, oils, nine hours of firewood and four people’s work: an honest breakdown of what a 200 ml bottle costs us.
Herbal hair oils in India range from ₹99 to well over ₹1,500 for the same size. Customers fairly ask why ours costs ₹495 for 200 ml. Here is roughly where the money goes for the bhringraj and hibiscus oil.
The oils are the largest single cost. We use cold-pressed sesame and coconut oil from small presses near Mandya, which cost us about two and a half times as much as refined oils. Cooking also loses some volume: 18 litres of oil, after nine hours on the fire with leaves and amla, give us about 15 litres of finished oil. Oils come to about ₹110 a bottle.
Fresh leaves picked the same morning, amla and fenugreek add about ₹35 a bottle; firewood for nine hours adds ₹10. The work of four women, washing and grinding leaves, stirring every fifteen minutes, filtering and bottling by hand, adds about ₹90. The glass bottle, cap, label and box come to ₹48. Courier, packing and the free shipping above ₹799 average about ₹55 a bottle.
After rent, the shop on Kalidasa Road, payment fees, GST and the bottles we give out as samples, what remains is our margin, about ₹80 a bottle. A cheaper oil is not always worse, but if it costs less than the cold-pressed oil inside it, something else has been added or changed. Read the label for mineral oil, paraffin or fragrance, and ask the seller for the batch date. Every one of our bottles carries both.
