Unsolicited Looksmaxxing about Hair
For the Unusual Tips for Looksmaxxing Series
For all you beautiful ladies and gents who are looksmaxxing, here are some words of wisdom you might not have ever heard of before.
On Hair
First of all — Your hair has feelings. It reacts to how you interact with it, how you feel about it. If you love it, it’ll love you back. Your hair is dead, but where it attaches to your scalp is alive. Consider it like tree bark. The outside of tree bark is completely dead, but then as you go more inward, there is a mixture of dead cells and alive cells, and then fully alive cells.
Even though your hair is dead, it is close enough to the alive stuff that how the alive stuff is interacted with matters.
Secondly — get it out of your head that “hair” is the category that you are working with. There’s curly hair, fine hair, asian hair, Latina hair, stringy hair, sad hair, tuberculosis hair — if you can start thinking of your hair with even one adjective, you will be better off.
Why? Because then things like “hair care” and “getting a haircut” start taking on way more specific meaning.
consider this: a hairdresser has to be prepared for any person, of any age, hair type, or ethnicity, to come in during the day and ask to have their hair cut, and they have to service them and whatever style they are asking for. It is a hard profession to do very well.
Compare this to something like getting a wax done — it is basically the same for each person, every time. In fact the less “artistry” you do and the more consistent you are at just following the instructions for the setup, the less painful it will be for the client.
You have some hair specialists who have hair specialties. There are hair artists who do asian hair, who do curly hair, who do bangs, who do men’s hair…
And so it helps you to understand “what kind of hair you have” and “what -kind of person knows what to do with it.”
I used to follow the advice of getting recommendations from my friends about where to go for a haircut. It took me way too long — but not too long — to ask the question, “my female friends I am asking are Chinese — does this matter?” When I started being pickier about my hair, I was paying more attention and yeah — it mattered - a lot. Asian hairdressers would not actually know how to handle my hair. They use a lot of techniques for straight, thick hair, that would absolutely not work on my wavy, finer hair.
It took me some time to go from that, to realizing that the people who understand my hair are people who do curly hair — and especially people who have specialized in cutting curly hair dry. Now, I mentioned that my hair is wavy, not curly. Actually when it is shorter, it is basically straight. This is what I mean. “What kind of hair I have” is not completely obvious. If I want my hair to be long and wavy and actually look good, I need to go to somebody who specializes in curly hair. This is not completely obvious. This took a bunch of thinking, and a bunch of experiences actually paying a lot, to people who really did not know what they were doing with the bangs-like parts in front.
It can also help to go to somebody who has your same hair type. This way they know what the pain points would be from personal experience. This is not necessary if the person actually has studied a specific hair type for 10 years, and themselves do not have this hair type.
and this is why going through this process is better than just looking at reviews — you have no idea what these people who give the reviews, what their pain points are, unless you read something like “my wispy blonde hair is really hard usually and this person nailed it.” Then if you have wispy blonde hair you might want to check out that person.
When you have done the thinking and have thought about what kind of person might be able to handle you, then telling them to do whatever they you want to do with, or telling them to tell you what they would want to do if they had full artistry, or telling them to do whatever they want within a range of ethoses, can be a pretty good idea.
Other thoughts….
products.
If you travel, the products stop working. actually though, if I fly from the east coast to the west coast, my products like, do not work as well.
The air is different. the water is different. The way my hair looks just ends up being different in hard-to-explain ways.
I like to have some expensive products that work extremely well that are my signature me products that I order online, and also have some CVS brands that I consider reliable and can just go to the store and get it wherever I am.
But often when I travel, the expensive stuff doesn’t work as well at the new location.
I had found Garnier Fructis to be too intense. Too powerful, too drying. Maybe it works well for some people, but that and Herbal Essences I stay away from, even though both brands smell very exciting.
I like Pantene, OGX usually. Redken, Tresemme. I do just buy ones that look cool in the flavor I like and for the hair type I have. Buying random shampoo for curly hair tends to work pretty ok for me. And then I have an expensive conditioner I like that I order online, but it sometimes randomly doesn’t work as well, and at those times I don’t like using it all up, and want to try using a bunch of something cheap instead.
Other thoughts…
the vitamins that are advertised as “hair skin and nails” do make your hair skin and nails better — or at least the ones I’d tried. Collagen.
Scalp massages are good. Do that for yourself
Cold water is good.