Valeva
The only line that costs us anything
Everything printed on the front of a bottle is free to print. There is one sentence in this business with a price attached to it, and the seller is the one who pays it.
A man who still has his hair. That is the entire subject here, and nothing on this page concerns hair anybody has already lost.
You have already paid for this experiment once
You bought a bottle because of what was printed on it, used it through a season, and then stood in your own bathroom working out whether anything had changed. Nobody else was going to tell you. You had paid for the answer and the answer was still yours to find.
A year of that is not unusual in this category. A year of paying to find out, and at the end of it the same shrug it started with.
That is the ordinary arrangement here, and it is worth naming out loud, because it costs the person selling the bottle absolutely nothing.
One question, and it works on any shelf
Take a sentence off the front of a bottle and ask what it would cost that company if the sentence turned out to be untrue for the man who bought it.
Almost always the answer is nothing. A word about strength or body costs nothing to print and nothing to be wrong about. A promise about how the hair will look by spring costs exactly what it costs to say it, which is zero, because by spring the sale is long closed and nobody is coming back for the invoice.
Three lines, then, and what each one costs the company that wrote it.
- Results may vary.
- Costs them nothing
- Three words that make every other sentence on the label free. Wherever they turn up, read upward: they are there to release the seller from whatever is printed above them.
- Money back, unopened.
- Costs them nothing
- That is a returns desk, and everybody has one, ourselves included. It is not a guarantee, because nobody can find out whether an oil works for them without opening it. A guarantee is the sentence that applies after the bottle has been opened, used for weeks, and did not do what it said it would.
- 90 DAYS. IF IT DIDN'T WORK, THE MONEY COMES BACK. NOTHING GOES BACK TO US.
- Costs us the bottle
- You keep the bottle. You keep what is left in it. The money goes back to the card it came from. There is no version of this where a man whose hair did not end up with more shine, more softness and better body is out of pocket, and no version where we get the product back to sell to somebody else.
Uncapped, because a bottle nobody has opened is a bottle nobody was ever in a position to judge.
Everything else here is a list, not a claim
Eight botanical oils and a vitamin E. Rosemary, castor, coconut, batana, jojoba, peppermint, avocado and olive, with tocopherol so the blend does not turn on the shelf. That is the whole of what is in the bottle and very nearly the whole of what this page intends to say about it.
One dull fact is worth having: jojoba is close enough to the oil the scalp already makes that the blend goes in rather than sitting on top of the head. The rest is a list. It can be read, priced by the ounce, and set against anything else in the cabinet. None of that is a promise. The promise is one sentence long and it is already above.
Four to six weeks to see it. 90 days to decide.
Shine, softness and body are surface effects. They happen on the fibre and on the scalp, and they do not wait on anything slow, so four to six weeks of ordinary use is the honest window in which to see them.
The term runs for 90 days. Read those two numbers next to each other, because the gap between them is the whole of what we are carrying.
A seller who wants a term he will never have to honour sets the trial and the term to the same length, so that the day a man is finally able to judge the thing is the day his window shuts. Ours leaves a minimum of 48 days after the point where it is meant to be visible. That is 48 days to look at your own hair, in your own bathroom, and decide on our money rather than yours.
Two drops, three to five times a week. That is the entire demand the 90 days make on anybody.
What the term asks of you, told before the sale rather than after it
A couple of drops on the scalp, in wet hair after the shower. Two to three minutes working it in with the fingers. Three to five times a week. Hair that takes a beating from chlorine, sun or a great deal of flying can have it left in daily instead, and it can also go on half an hour before shampooing. That is all of it.
The routine is stated here rather than after the sale because it is the only part of this arrangement our side cannot carry for you.
More shine, more body, five weeks in
These are the only sentences on the page that we did not write.
I will say this: I have been skeptical of oils since the 1980s, when they were sold to me as a cure for everything. 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
I read the label before I opened it. Eight botanical oils and a vitamin E, [...] nothing that needs a footnote. [...] This isn't pretending to be a drug, which puts me at ease. Five weeks in: the shine is back and the hair has a bit more body to it. I'll take that.
Victor A., 52
The bottle you quit
There is probably one in the cabinet behind the razor: started, never finished, quietly abandoned somewhere in the second month. Quitting it cost the full price of it, and nobody was ever going to argue about that. It is the ordinary way these things end, and it is the exact outcome this sentence was written to cover.
90 DAYS. IF IT DIDN'T WORK, THE MONEY COMES BACK. NOTHING GOES BACK TO US.
You keep the bottle and whatever is left in it. No return, no shipping label, no questions.
The product page lists what is in the bottle, and the list is the same one printed above. Starting is what puts the 90 days on our side of the table instead of yours.
Waiting is free and it always will be. It is also the only course open here with no term attached to it at all, and a year of it will teach exactly what this year taught.
Start the 90 days