Who writes this site
My name is Mori. I spent eight years as a licensed hairdresser — two of them in Shanghai, at the salon inside Isetan, and six in Tokyo.
My speciality was shukumo kyosei — Japanese hair straightening, the treatment sold in the US and Europe as thermal reconditioning or Japanese straightening. It is a chemical and thermal process that permanently restructures the hair, and it is unforgiving. Get the strength wrong, or the heat wrong, or misjudge how much damage the hair has already taken, and you do not get a second attempt. You spend years learning to read hair before you touch it.
I no longer work behind a chair. I still hold the licence, and I still read a shampoo label the way I was trained to.
I live in Japan. That is the other half of why this site exists.
Why this site exists
Japanese shampoo has a reputation abroad that it mostly deserves. But the way it reaches people outside Japan is a mess.
Most English-language roundups of Japanese hair care are written by people who have never worked with the products professionally, never stood in a Japanese drugstore, and cannot read the ingredient list on the back of the bottle. They rank whatever sells, describe every product as “authentic,” and move on.
The result is that people abroad buy the wrong thing constantly. They buy a clarifying shampoo for damaged hair. They buy a heavy moisture formula for fine hair and conclude that Japanese shampoo is overhyped. They import a flagship Japanese hair dryer without knowing it runs on 100V and will not work properly in a US socket.
None of those are product failures. They are matching failures — and matching is exactly what a hairdresser does all day.
What I actually do here, and what I don’t
I want to be precise about this, because most affiliate sites are not.
What I do:
- Read formulations and product specifications the way I was trained to — what a surfactant will do to fine hair, why a protein-heavy formula stiffens curls, what “buildup” physically is
- Read customer reviews in volume and identify the patterns that repeat, rather than quoting the most dramatic ones
- Explain which hair type a product is genuinely built for, including when the answer is “not yours”
- Verify that every product I link to actually exists and is currently available
What I don’t do:
- I do not claim to have personally tested every product on this site. Where I have used something, I say so. Where I am reading formulations and aggregated reviews, I say that instead
- I do not recommend a product simply because it pays better
- I do not write “everything here is great.” If a product is wrong for you, the article says so
Professional training tells you how hair behaves. It does not tell you what a specific bottle feels like on your head. Those are different claims, and I keep them separate.
What eight years behind a chair actually teaches you
Two things, mostly.
First, that almost every hair complaint is a matching problem. Clients came in convinced their hair was “impossible.” Usually their hair was fine — they were using a product built for a different hair type, often an expensive one. The fix was rarely to spend more.
Second, that damage is cumulative and invisible until it isn’t. Straightening taught me this the hard way. Hair that looks fine can be one process away from breaking, and nothing on the bottle warns you. That is why the articles here spend as much time on how often to use something as on which one to buy — frequency causes more damage than product choice.
Shanghai, and why it matters
Two years in Shanghai meant working with hair that behaved differently from what I had trained on, in a language I was still learning, for clients whose expectations were set by a different market.
It made me much more careful about assuming that what works for one person works for the next. A lot of hair care writing quietly assumes one hair type. This site tries not to.
Affiliate disclosure
This site earns commission when you buy through the Amazon links here, at no extra cost to you. That is how it is funded.
It does not change which products get recommended. The comparison tables list products that are wrong for certain hair types, and several articles tell you not to buy the more expensive option. If the recommendation always pointed at the priciest thing, this disclosure would be worth nothing.
Getting in touch
If something here is wrong, or a link is broken, or you want a second opinion on what your hair actually needs — tell me. I would rather fix an article than leave it wrong.