Editorial Policy

Independence

• No brand pays for inclusion, for a ranking position, or for favorable coverage. There is no mechanism by which they could.
• We accept no free product, review samples or loaner units from manufacturers.
• No brand sees a page before it publishes. Nobody gets a preview, a right of reply before publication, or approval over wording.
• Affiliate commission never affects which product is picked or which one is named as the skip. Structurally it cannot: the skip is the pick that earns us nothing, and every roundup has one.
• We run no sponsored posts and no advertising. Affiliate commission is the entire business model, disclosed at the affiliate disclosure.

Sourcing standards

• Specifications come from the manufacturer’s own product page, and the URL is linked under every spec block. Never from a retailer listing, a press release, another publication, or memory.
• Prices come from a live price data layer or are not shown at all. No price is ever typed into copy. Data older than 48 hours disappears automatically.
• Computed figures — running costs, price per use — show their working: the input, the assumption, the rate, and the arithmetic.
• Scientific claims cite peer-reviewed literature by title, authors, journal and year, linked.
• Unsourceable values render as “Not published”. Never an estimate, never a typical value, never a remembered figure.

Claims we will never make

These are absolute, and they are the reason several pages on this site are shorter or less confident than their competitors.

• That we tested a product. We have no lab, no test units and no test data. “Tested”, “Tested and Reviewed”, “Lab Tested” and “Hairstylist-Approved” will never appear in a title, heading or description here.
• That we own or have used a product. No “in our testing”, no “we found”, no “hands-on”.
• A credential we do not hold. No stylist, trichologist, dermatologist or expert panel.
• Tenure. No “long-time”, “veteran”, “years of” or “seasoned”.
• A rating we did not derive. There are no star ratings on this site, because a rating implies an evaluation we did not perform.
• A review or testimonial. There is no business here for anyone to review, so there is no reviews section and there never will be an invented one.
• A health claim we cannot cite. Where no citable source exists, the question is answered as unresolved or omitted.

Structured data

We do not emit Review, AggregateRating or star rating markup of any kind. Those tell a search engine we evaluated a product, and we did not. The same restraint that governs the visible copy governs the machine-readable version of it.

Corrections

• Report anything you believe is wrong to info@strandandsteam.com or via the contact form. A link to the manufacturer page or paper makes it faster.
• Factual errors are corrected as soon as we can verify the correct figure.
• Material corrections are noted on the page with a date — we do not silently edit a page and leave the impression it always said the new thing.
• Typographical and formatting fixes are made without a note.
• If a manufacturer changes a published specification, the spec block is updated and the page’s updated date reflects the re-verification.

Update cadence

• Continuous: prices refresh from the live data layer.
• Quarterly: every spec block re-verified against current manufacturer documentation; every outbound citation and buy link checked.
• Annually, in January: roundup titles and picks refreshed for the new year; price-per-use arithmetic re-run.
• On any content change: the site’s llms.txt files updated to match.

The visible “Updated” date on every page reflects a real review. We do not bump it to look fresh — a false freshness date is the same category of lie as a false testing claim, and this site treats it that way.

Conflicts of interest

Strand & Steam earns commission on purchases made through its links, which means we make money when you buy and nothing when you do not. That is a real conflict and we would rather name it than let it sit unstated.

The structural answers: every roundup names a product we would not buy; the heat-damage section carries no buy button above the fold; and several pages here conclude that the most useful thing you can do is use heat less often and buy nothing at all. Those pages earn us nothing and they are the honest advice.