BABS Salon & Spa

By Vina Lybbert


If you haven’t seen the commercial, you should. I love it! Basically, there is a small salon on one side of the street and the owner is standing outside looking at the crazy busy new “haircut factory” across the street boasting $6 haircuts. The owner looks at his own empty shop, and suddenly an idea pops into his head. The next scene is his shop with a sign across the front window claiming, “We fix $6 haircuts!” The line of bad haircuts waiting to get into the door is hilarious

This is a perfect example of wanting to save a buck, take a shortcut, and end up desperately wishing you hadn’t. The majority of people taking shortcuts with their hair simply do not understand the chemistry and technique behind what we actually do in the hair industry. I say this because if they did, our salon would not have so many calls that sound like this: “Can you please fit me in today. My hair is orange and I used the same color I’ve always used but this time it’s ORANGE!”

Let’s be honest, we’ve all done that. You pick a box up at the local drug store, the same color you’ve always used—light auburn brown—only to discover that this time your hair is the same color as that wig you saw in the Halloween shop. Only bonus here is that you no longer need to actually buy the wig for your costume this year! *bah dum ching*

If you are going to continue to play stylist, then I’m guessing that you already know and understand the following:

1. The hair swatch on the shelf for box color is white hair that has been colored. Meaning, if you paint a white wall a light brown color you are going to come up with an entirely different color than if you paint a wall that already has color. Unless your hair is white, you will not receive the same results as that swatch. Period.

2. When you come into our salon for hair color, we have to take a lot into consideration: Your existing color, your new growth color, are your ends faded out (yet another color), is the hair healthy or fragile, are the ends compromised, etc. Of all the decisions we have to make with color, the developer level we use with the color is yet another. Hair has a scaly outer layer called a cuticle. We have to open that cuticle ever so slightly with developer in order to get those color molecules into the hair. Hair that has been chemically treated is often compromised in ways that only a trained stylist can detect. Box colors contain 30+ volume developer—they have to in order to get the lift they “claim” they can achieve on “any” hair—and 30 volume developer can be very harsh on hair and cause breakage. Think about it, your natural color (roots), the colored midshaft, and the delicate ends should not all receive the same high volume cuticle blow out in order to achieve the desired color. Eventually, you’re going to end up with roots that are lighter (hot roots) than the midshaft and ends that break away easily. Congratulations! Now go call your stylist and hope she can fix it!

3. The color wheel is your best friend. If your hair is too ashy, you of course know which colors to avoid in order to neutralize the ashy tones, right? You also know the contributing color pigment in both your natural hair and in the color you’re using? You understand that sometimes your roots will require a different color with a different level of developer than your midshaft and ends, correct? And finally, I’m sure you have a full understanding of neutral tones and can look at your own hair and not only determine what level of neutral it is, but also know exactly what mix of colors you need to achieve the desired level 6 light auburn brown from scalp to ends? Perfect! Then you also understand that you will never achieve this with boxed color off the shelf.

There is a reason that stylists can look at a head of hair and know almost instantly that it has been box colored. And some of you do-it-yourselfers have learned that some beauty supply stores do not require a professional license to purchase hair color products. This has caused a whole new painful era for your stylist. Just because you can do it at home does not mean you should! Not only do you need a full and complete understanding of all of the above, there are numerous other ways you can damage your hair beyond repair by playing stylist.

Here is an example:

A client somehow came across a basic knowledge of hair color and her and a friend decided to go to a Beauty Supply store and do their color and highlights at home. The client purchased a red brown color, but the associate helping her (who had never attended cosmetology school) told her that in order to lift her hair she would need a high developer. They went home and she followed the instructions for the color from the associate’s suggestions. To her horror, the client ended up with red orange hair. Her friend suggested that the brush-in highlights would help to break it up, so the client allowed her friend to brush in some professional grade highlighting bleach.

The end result:



Needless to say, the client walked into her salon with her hair tucked under a baseball cap, and was very thankful that her stylist could work her in. The hair was severely compromised and fragile. After a long consultation, the professional stylist used highlights and lowlights to take the client’s hair back to a wearable color. However, in the end the stylist had to cut off the last 4 to 6 inches of the client’s hair as the breakage from the damage was too severe to recover the ends. The client admittedly learned her lesson and is a devoted regular client, leaving the chemical treatments to the trained professionals from here on out.

After:



The phrase “do not try this at home” should be spray painted across the front of beauty supply stores that allow non-licensed customers to purchase professional grade chemical products. If the person purchasing the chemicals AND the person selling the product and offering “advise” have neither attended cosmetology training, the results can be simply devastating.

There is so much you need to know and understand when changing the chemical structure of your hair: Varying processing times depending on the hair fabric, lines of demarcation and when to not overlap chemicals to avoid breakage, the list goes on and on. The beauty industry has seen some fantastic products go down the drain because untrained clients start using it at home and end up with allergic reactions, burning from overprocessing or misuse, or chemical breakage from a sheer lack of knowledge. Nowadays, with the internet, people will post pictures and boiling statements about products that “ruined their hair.” What they forget to say, and what the readers forget to understand is that they should not have been using it in the first place as an untrained individual. Would you stitch up your own child? Would you represent yourself in a lawsuit? No? Then why would you take such risks with chemicals in your hair?

Perhaps until you’ve seen your hair melt and string out like gum, or break off about midshaft all over your head (aka chemical cut to the hair industry), or your stylist has to cut off 6 inches of burned and damaged hair, you just won’t understand the importance of leaving it to the professionals. But please understand that you may color your own hair 100 times with no ill effect; however, the 101st time may leave you crying in my chair while I try desperately to save your hair and save you from humiliation. It is then that I need you to remember that I am a hair stylist, not a miracle worker. :-)