A clarifying shampoo works on what sits on top of the hair: styling product, silicone residue, excess oil, the film that builds up when a gentle daily shampoo never quite finishes the job. It is a surface problem and a surface solution.
A chelating shampoo is after something else entirely. Chelating agents bind metal ions, the calcium, magnesium, iron and copper that hard water and chlorinated pools leave behind on the hair shaft, and a standard clarifying formula will not shift those no matter how much lather it makes.
That distinction matters here more than in most places, and for a reason most people never hear. Dubai tap water is desalinated by reverse osmosis, which strips it almost bare, and then calcium and magnesium are deliberately added back before it reaches your building. The water arrives between roughly 100 and 250 milligrams per litre measured as calcium carbonate, which puts it in moderately hard territory, with total dissolved solids commonly reported around 200 to 400 milligrams per litre.
So the mineral load in your shower is not an accident of local geology. It is put there on purpose, for reasons that have nothing to do with your hair.
Those minerals do not leave with the water that carried them. They settle on the cuticle and accumulate, which is why hair can start to feel coated, look duller than it did, resist colour, and take longer to dry, even when nothing about your routine has changed. People usually blame the shampoo they have been using for two years. Often it is the water.
How often you need to reset depends on which of the two problems you have. Most hair types can clarify once a week or once a fortnight. Chelating is more of an occasional reset than a habit, and doing it too often is harder on the hair than not doing it at all.
If you want to know whether a bottle actually chelates, read the ingredient list rather than the claim on the front. The common chelating agents are EDTA, phytic acid and sodium gluconate. Our own shampoo is formulated with sodium phytate and gluconolactone, and gluconolactone is doing two jobs there, because it is also a PHA, a gentle acid whose molecule is large enough that it stays near the surface.
None of this requires a special product category or a complicated routine. It requires knowing which of the two problems you are actually trying to solve.