Affiliate Disclosure

The short version

Strand & Steam earns a commission when you buy a product through a link on this site. It costs you nothing extra — the price is the same whether you arrive through us or type the address yourself.

Affiliate commission is our entire business model. We run no advertising, no sponsored posts, and no paid placements.

Amazon Associates

Strand & Steam is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

Our Associates tracking tag is fafstrandandsteam-20. It is appended to the links we send you to, which is how Amazon knows a purchase came from here.

What the /go links do

Every product link on this site points at a path on our own domain that starts /go/, which redirects you to the retailer. We would rather tell you what that is than let it look like something being hidden.

• It lets us change where a link points — to a different retailer, or a replacement product — without editing every article that mentions it.
• It lets us count clicks, so we know which recommendations people actually act on.
• It appends the affiliate tag in one place rather than in hundreds of hand-written URLs, which is how tags go wrong.

The redirect is checked against a list of retailers we recognize, so it cannot be used to send anyone to an arbitrary site. Every one of these links is marked rel="sponsored nofollow" and opens in a new tab.

Where our links go

Currently, every earning link on this site goes to Amazon. We are not joined to any other affiliate network, and we do not build tracked links for programs we have not joined — which means a link to a manufacturer’s own store here earns us nothing at all, and we would rather link it and say so than not link it.

That is the normal state of a new publisher rather than a problem. Every link destination is a configuration entry, so if we join a program that is genuinely better for you, it changes in one place.

How we keep commission out of the editorial

We make money when you buy something and nothing when you do not. That is a real conflict of interest, and stating it is easier than managing it. What we actually do about it:

• Every roundup names a product we would not buy. We earn nothing on those, and every roundup has one.
• The heat-damage section carries no buy button above the fold. Somebody asking whether their damaged hair can be repaired is worried, not shopping, and putting a product above that answer would be taking advantage of the moment.
• Several pages conclude you should buy nothing. How often you can use heat and flat irons for damaged hair both say plainly that using heat less often will do more for your hair than any purchase. Those pages earn us nothing.
• Picks are chosen on published specifications in a documented order — set out here — and commission rate is not one of the criteria.
• The most expensive product is frequently the skip. Our named skips include the Dyson Airwrap and the Dyson Supersonic on the pages where the published specs do not support them, and those are the highest-commission items we could point at.

Prices

Prices on this site come from a live data feed and carry the date they were verified. If that data is more than 48 hours old, prices disappear and every button falls back to “Check price”.

No price is ever hand-typed into an article. Prices change constantly, and a number written into a sentence is wrong within a week — which is both an Amazon Associates policy problem and, more to the point, a reader arriving at a checkout expecting something that is not there.

Per-page disclosure

A short disclosure appears above the first affiliate link on every page that carries one, and #ad plus a link back here appears under every buy button — including when there is no price to show. This page alone would not be sufficient, and the FTC is right about that.

Questions

If anything here is unclear, or you think a page is not living up to it, email info@strandandsteam.com or use the contact form.