She said the expensive part out loud

I work for the company that makes Golden Oil, so this is an advertisement and it should be read as one. The conversation below was not mine. I was standing next to it, waiting for the same car.

Four people outside a restaurant on Madison, at the end of a lunch that had gone on too long. The game that goes around a group like that one is always the same, and nobody ever asks it seriously: who here has the most money. No one answers it about himself. Everyone points at somebody else, and the pointing is the entire joke.

Then it turned into a compliment, the way it always does. One of them asked the woman with the silver at her temples how she still has all that hair at her age. And she gave the standard answer, the one everybody gives. Good genes. Her mother had it until the end. Luck.

There is a reason that question gets a shrug. Answering it properly means admitting that something is being kept up, and on that block nothing is ever admitted to be kept up. Faces are lucky. Waists are genetic. Hair is from the mother's side. Every one of those replies is built to cost the speaker nothing, and underneath they are all the same sentence: I am not doing anything, this is simply how I am.

The guy at the club asked what I was doing differently. I said nothing. That's the review.

Peter L., 63

That email arrived at the company that sells him the thing he was not going to name. He was asked in public, he deflected in public, and then he sat down and wrote the truth to a stranger. The wanting is completely ordinary. Saying it out loud is the part that costs something.

Which is why the last one at that kerb ended the conversation. She had been quiet all afternoon. She named what she uses, said how many times a week she uses it, and said that it is expensive, in that order and in one breath, with no apology attached to any of the three. Then the car came. Nobody had anything to add, and I have thought about it ever since.

Where the oil goes, and how often

Golden Oil goes on the scalp, on the skin the hair comes out of, and not along the length where the eye is. About 1 ml on a whole head, on damp hair after the shower, three to five times a week, worked in for two to three minutes. There is a daily leave-in mode as well, which is the one for hair that takes a beating from pools, aeroplanes and sun.

Nine ingredients, and the useful thing about the list is what each one physically does with the mixture. Jojoba is close enough to what the skin already makes that the blend goes in instead of sitting on top of it. Castor and batana are heavy and stay for hours rather than lifting off. Coconut goes into the fibre itself. Vitamin E is what stops the mixture turning while the bottle sits open on a shelf. Nothing on that list needs a footnote, and nothing on it is pretending to be anything other than an oil.

Shine and softness move first, in about four to six weeks, because they are surface and they are not waiting on anything slower than themselves. Body comes after. No oil shortens a hair cycle, and this one does not claim to.

I don't do much with my hair, which is the point. I want it to look cared for without looking done. This oil does exactly that: a little in the morning, and by evening it looks as though I'd spent an hour on it, which I hadn't. My hairdresser has noticed, and her opinion is the only one I've ever trusted on the subject.

Catherine H., 58

The bottles at the back of the cabinet

Everyone with a bathroom cabinet has two or three of them. Bought in good faith, used until the novelty wore off, pushed to the back, kept for a year in case. They are not there because the person is lazy. They are there because the decision behind them was never closed. It was rented, month to month, and it lapsed the first week nothing visible happened.

My wife noticed before I did, which is how I know it's working. She said I looked rested, and I've learned over the years that when she uses that word about my face, it's about the hair. I've been through a few products over the years that promised the world and delivered a brochure. This one just keeps doing its job.

Charles B., 55

Old enough to keep it

The promise here is small and it is about time. Hair looked after where it is actually made goes on looking like the hair of the person it belongs to, a few years further along than it otherwise would. Nobody is being offered a different head. What is on offer is a slower argument with the calendar, and the people who take it are not the ones with a problem. They are the ones who decided early that this is a thing they intend to keep.

This one makes no such promises, which is exactly why I kept using it. The hair looks the way it did a decade ago, not better, just maintained. One does not ask for more than that at my age.

Douglas R., 67

That is the ending, and it is why the conversation on Madison stopped where it did. She was not the richest person at the kerb. She was the only one who was not going to pretend that nothing was being kept up.