Here’s how I’d handle it because my husband and I have been down this path.

Hey honey, I’m making home made sausage for you. Really? Cool. Here you go, enjoy. Wow, this is really good, what’s in it? Spices AB&C and ground turkey. No way, this tastes like beef! It’s turkey. You’re making that up. *shows package* Wow, what else does this taste good in? Petty much everything I serve you most of the time. Gee, no wonder I’ve been having less stomach problems, all that fatty beef and pork must have been upsetting it.

Than again, my husband is a grown up. Most of the time. If her husband is not than the problem isn’t her dishonesty but his immaturity.

Yes, she should ASK him about his hair in a non gotcha kind of way and if he says it’s the same why, tell him well, I kinda ran out of yours so I tossed in some of mine until shopping day. I hope it cleaned your hair as well.

Then let HIM make the decision. If he wants to switch, do not gloat, if he does not, shop around for a better price OR suggest he make the purchase himself.

For those of you playing the sexist if he’s making the money dance shame on you. That is NOT what you base a relationship on and you ought to think long and hard about how sexist and unenlightened you sound. For all YOU know she’s pulling home the bigger pay check.

I do.

A coworker of mine once brought eggplant parmesan to a company potluck, and when I asked her for the recipe, she confessed to me (in private) that it was store-bought but she’d transferred it to one of her own plates so that people would think she’d made it. I thought that little fib was perfectly adorable. I did not think that this act was representational of her unethical dishonesty to the company!

If I switched out my boyfriend’s shampoo like this, he would laugh about it when I told him later (especially because I’m way more of a cheapskate than he is). We try to keep our relationship much more friendship-oriented so that these petty little experiences don’t get blown out of proportion and hurt our relationship. I hope most of you do the same in your marriages!

I’m on the side of “it’s just shampoo.” Obviously. But tell him, sure. Continuing to secretly fill his shampoo bottle with cheap stuff would make you seem like a crazy person (and your point would not be made, anyhow).

As for Aveda, I too was once foolish enough to buy into that salon-sell, and at $8/bottle MANY MOONS ago, I can only imagine what customers are being GOUGED for now. Yes, that’s right… gouged.

Too bad hubby was too bull-headed to try another shampoo, and good for Jane for making the switch. In time she should tell him that he’s happy with the much cheaper brand – and if he’s smart, he’ll be happy about it. Most shampoos have the same basic ingredients, and most of them (added vitamins, etc.) are NOT even absorbed by the hair – as advertisements would have you believe. If Jane’s hubby needs a ‘salon’ solution, she should get him some Tres Semme; it seems a number of salons actually use these products on their customers, and the stylists’ hair, too.

How about who earns the monies in the relationship? We do have separation of workshare for a reason.

I went through something simmilar with my boyfriend. He wanted the same kind of shampoo he had used for years. (He is a creature of habit, and likes things to stay the same.) They didn’t have his kind with a pump anymore,(which is preferred due to our shower set up) so I bought him a different kind and he fussed about it for a minute, and that was the last I heard of it. Now he doesn’t care what brand it is.
Sometimes peole can be stubborn, just to be stubborn. And sometimes it is worth it to switch it up for them to realize that the world won’t come to an end. But it’s not worth hiding it from them.

But if I were her, I would tell him. Maybe he won’t care once he realizes he couldn’t tell the different between the cheaper stuff and the more expensive stuff. And if he does care, he should buy his own shampoo!

Meanwhile, I bet he doesn’t like Aveda enough to go out and buy it himself. If she is left with the task of going out and gathering everything (clothes, socks, food, toiletries), then it’s up to her what goes in the cart.

Personal care is personal for a reason. I would rather cut out one dining out experience per month to be able to afford good quality natural skin care products. Most importantly, my partner knows where I stand on this issue- whether or not he agrees. Communication is key.

This depends largely on the disposition and personality of Jane’s husband. If he is truly too irrational to give Suave a legitimate chance, based on brand snobbery alone, then his reaction to the confession would go something like this:

“Man, I KNEW there was something wrong with that shampoo. I couldn’t quite figure out why my hair hasn’t been looking right, these past few months. No wonder!”

In other words, he can docilely use the Suave ad infinitum, but as soon as he finds out, then she ALL OF A SUDDEN can magically tell the difference, and “he knew it all along”.

In other words, it is possible that the discovery will retroactively color his perception of the Suave, and he will not admit (and possibly not even believe) that its results were similar or “good enough” to live with, for 10% of the cost of the Aveda.

Sometimes people are too brand-stubborn to be rational about decisions like this. At some point, the buck must stop with whomever is responsible for the family meeting its budget.

In a good partnership, this would never be an issue, because both would listen to the other and after open discussion, they would both arrive at the SAME value judgement as to whether Aveda is worth the money.

I agree with Susan – who buys decides what is done. My husband also hated cottage cheese, but I bought it anyway because I loved it. But he got to make up his own mind and not eat it.

My mother taught us early. One day she told us she had put 1 oz of caster oil in the 1# bag of navy beans she cooked. We really raised the roof. She said “I’ve done it for the past 5 times I’ve cooked beans and you didn’t notice, so you get no choice now.” She had learned this from a man who owned a restaurant and said no one would buy beans or bean soup at lunch unless they trusted it would cause no problems at work. Since you usually cook beans with fatty meat (ham hocks, fat back bacon, etc., there would be way to notice the taste. I used it for all the years my family was at home.

Guess I should not have endured 44 years of a wonderful marriage, according to most of you.

I think Jane needs to be honest with him, if he’s not a stuck up loser he’ll laugh it off and go buy a new bottle of shampoo or keep using the cheap stuff.

The thing I dislike about all the frugal talk is it sounds so….boring. There are beautiful things in life to be enjoyed. Yes, pick and choose. But you don’t get a medal at the end if you used all natural dirt to shampoo your hair…..just sayin

“Honey, I know you feel that the Aveda looks better on you, but I still feel that my brand is just as good. So would you be willing to try something out with me? I’ll put some of your shampoo in one jar and some of mine in another, and not tell you which is which. You use one of them for a week, then the other the next week, and if you can guess which one was the Aveda, we’ll keep buying it.”

As for the ingredients, yep, they were the same for the big price name brand as for Suave. I say this as someone who was once a chemist in the cosmetic industry. For all those people who say “I just need my $50 per bottle shampoo” I say “You’re making a starving chemist very happy.” Guess what’s in Bath and Body Works “Aromatherapy Sugar Scrubs” – fragrance, mineral oil (you can find it in the pharmacy section of your grocery store), turbinado sugar (you can find it next to the sugar in your grocery store). They charge $16 for 13 oz.

As for lead in lipstick (CB #14): No, lead is not used as an ingredient. Can it potentially be in some of the components of lipstick? Yes. That’s why the FDA has limits on things like that. There’s not enough lead to harm you, even if you ate an entire case of lipstick. (FD&C Red#6 has a limit of 20 parts per million of lead, I think.)

FYI, there’s also likely lead in your drinking water, but the concentration is below the Limit of Detection, meaning there’s not a reproducible result that can be generated, and the instrumentation isn’t sensitive enough to give a reliable result. (For example, one run might say there’s 20 parts per trillion, while a duplicate run might say there’s 1 part per trillion. At some point, the signal is indistinguishable from instrument noise.)