VALEVA · Scalp Oil

Oil has been a word for fraud for two hundred years

Nobody has to explain that to a man of fifty five. There is a shelf in his bathroom where the seals are still on, and he is the one who put them there.

Four bottles, and how each one got there

He knows what is in them. That is exactly why the rest are still shut.

Every one of those was a decision he made alone and carried alone. This page ends with terms that make that impossible. They are the argument here, not the small print at the bottom of it.

A bathroom cabinet shelf of sealed, unopened hair products, a hand closing the door
A cabinet in a house where money was never the obstacle. The seals are intact because he read the labels, not because he did not.

The word never described the liquid

Snake oil was a real product before it was an insult. What turned the phrase into a word for fraud was never the contents of the bottle. It was the arrangement around it. A man arrived, made a claim nobody in town could check, took the money, and was somewhere else by the time anyone could work out whether he had been right. The bottle was incidental. The leaving was the trick.

Two hundred years later the arrangement is intact and only the travel has been automated. The claim on the front is still one that cannot be checked from outside the bottle. The seller is still not there in the morning. He is a return address in a state you have never visited, and a policy that holds only while the seal on the back is unbroken, which means it holds only while the product is useless to you.

So the question a man is actually asking, standing in front of that shelf, is not whether the oil is any good. He has no way to know that and neither does the label. He is asking whether anybody will still be standing behind it on the day he decides it was not.

What a man who is leaving cannot say

A man of about fifty five at his kitchen counter, a full head of his own hair, greying at the temples, in the condition he means to keep it
He still has all of it, and it is the same hair he had last year. That is the whole of the claim, and it is the one he was quietly making anyway.

The arrangement, which is the reason this page exists

On day 90 he decides. If the answer is no, there is nothing to pack and nothing to post, and no question about whether the seal on the bottle is broken. It is broken. It was broken on the first night, because a product you have not opened has told you nothing.

The account also has a person attached to it. Write to VALEVA support and somebody reads your case and answers it against how you actually live, rather than sending you the same three lines everyone gets.

90 DAYS. IF IT DIDN'T WORK, THE MONEY COMES BACK. NOTHING GOES BACK TO US.

The open VALEVA Golden Oil bottle on a used bathroom counter, oil beaded on the marble, its dropper resting on a folded towel
A couple of drops on the scalp after a shower, on damp hair, three to five times a week. Two or three minutes of working it in with your fingers, and that is the whole of it.

Keep what you already have

He does not need a new head of hair, and he was never going to get one out of a bottle or out of anything else that arrives in one. What is on the table is smaller than that and it is the only thing that was ever genuinely for sale: the hair he has now, a year from now, in the condition he decided it would be in.

Three to five nights a week, on the part of him that is still working. Four to six weeks before there is anything to look at. 90 days before he owes anybody an opinion, and if the opinion is no, the whole thing cost him two minutes a night.

Oil is a word for fraud because the man selling it left. This one has a return address, a person on the other end of it, and a bottle he gets to keep either way. That is not a better promise than the others on the shelf. It is a promise somebody stayed for.

Order a bottle