I've thrown out more hair clips than I care to admit. This is the one that stayed.

Six things a plain matte clip gets right that a drawer full of expensive ones got wrong, written down by a customer, not a hairdresser.

There is a drawer in my bathroom I'm not proud of. Claw clips with a snapped tooth. A tortoiseshell one that cost forty dollars and slid down the back of my head within the hour. Two that pinched so hard I'd get a headache by lunchtime. I'd genuinely decided the problem was my hair — too fine, too slippery, too much of it depending on the day — and that clips simply weren't for me. Then I spent a Saturday morning at the netball courts watching the woman on the canteen roster, and now I'm the one writing a letter about a hair clip.

She'd been on her feet since eight. Bending into the freezer, leaning over the counter, hair up in a plain matte clip the colour of weak coffee. And it had not moved. Not once. I finally asked her about it somewhere around the third quarter, which is how I ended up ordering the Elegant Matte Solid Colour Hair Clip from Cute Home, a small Melbourne outfit, half expecting it to be the forty-first clip in the drawer.

It wasn't. I wrote to them to say so, and they asked if they could share it for other women to read. So here it is — the six things this clip gets right.

This is the part nobody had ever explained to me. Almost every clip in my drawer was glossy — polished, shiny plastic. And shiny plastic against smooth hair is two slippery surfaces trying to hold onto each other. Of course it slides. This one has a matte, slightly textured coating instead, and you can feel the difference the second you close it. It grips the hair rather than sitting on top of it. That's it. That's the trick, and it's so simple I was almost annoyed.

"My hair is stick straight and nothing holds it. This is the first clip that hasn't slid out by morning tea."

The teeth are rounded off at the ends rather than cut sharp. It sounds like a small thing until you've spent years hearing that little crunch of hair snapping every time you take a clip out. This one comes out clean. No pulling at the back, no snagging, no handful of broken bits in the sink afterwards. My hair is long enough that I notice.

"I've been growing my hair out and I was losing it to my old clips. Six weeks with this one and no breakage at all."

Heavy clips drag. You feel them pulling at the back of your head all afternoon, and by mid-afternoon it's a proper ache. This one weighs next to nothing — you put it in at seven and you've simply forgotten about it. I've worn mine straight through a full workday and taken it out at night realising I hadn't thought about my hair once since breakfast.

"No more headaches. I didn't even realise my old clips were causing them until I stopped wearing them."

Anything holds hair while you're sitting still. The test is the school run, the gym, leaning back against the car headrest, bending over the dishwasher. Mine has been through all of it and stayed where I put it. That's the whole job of a hair clip, and it's remarkable how few of them actually do it.

"I wear mine at the gym now, which I would never have risked with any other clip I've owned."

They come in black, beige, light brown and mocha — all soft, flat, no shine and no pattern. Which means the clip doesn't announce itself. There's no glossy plastic catching the light in photos, no bright tortoiseshell competing with what you're wearing. It reads as tidy rather than as an accessory, and that's exactly what I wanted. I wear the mocha one most days and the black when I'm dressed up.

"The beige one is almost invisible in my hair. It just looks like my hair is up, not like I'm wearing something."

I assumed the multi-pack was just a way of padding out the value. It isn't. One lives in the bathroom, one in my handbag, one in the car, one on my desk at work — and the whole low-grade nuisance of never having a clip when you need one has simply gone away. They come in fours, sixes and eights. I started with the four, gave one to my sister within a fortnight, and went back for the six. That's the honest sequence of events.

"Bought the set of six and split it with my two daughters. All three of us have stopped stealing each other's."

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One honest note before the price

It's a substantial clip. If you have very fine or very short hair and you're used to the small glossy ones, it will feel bigger in your hand than you expect. That's what lets it hold a full head of hair without straining, but it's worth knowing going in. For thick, long or heavy hair it's the reason it works. For a fine bob it may be more clip than you need.

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The matte clip, against the clips you've been buying

You can buy a hair clip for under $30 almost anywhere. I know, because I have a drawer full of them. Here's the difference, laid out plainly.

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About the price

I'll be straightforward, because the price is what made me suspicious in the first place. The set of four is $29.99, down from $60. Six is $34.99 and eight is $39.99, so the bigger sets work out cheaper again — the eight lands at about five dollars a clip, which is less than a coffee and considerably less than the single tortoiseshell one currently sitting broken in my drawer.

Cute Home says the sale pricing is about selling direct with no middleman taking a cut, and that at this price the margin is thin. That's their arithmetic, not mine. What I can tell you is that I've paid four times as much for a clip that lasted a fortnight, and this one has been in my hair nearly every day since it arrived.

If you've quietly given up on hair clips because none of them stay put, this is the one I'd hand you myself.

— Amy

About the writer. Amy Johnson lives in Melbourne, VIC. She has been buying and losing hair clips for over twenty years and has written to a brand about one exactly once. She is not affiliated with Cute Home beyond being a customer.

This page is an advertisement for Cute Home. Amy's letter is shared with her permission. Cute Home · An Australian start-up from Melbourne · Free Australia-wide delivery · 30-day money back guarantee.