Stop pouring your products down the drain.

Today, I worked with a fifteen year old client who currently attends the high school that I went to. Among other things, it got me thinking about what I knew about my hair when I was fifteen. Comparatively with The Me of Today, it's embarrassing.

My strongest memory is the morning that I cried before school because my fine, curly hair was frizzy [and hadn't been cut in at *least* six months] and I couldn't get a handle on it. Thankfully my mother, a beautiful woman who takes care of herself and passed her curls down to me, intervened and taught me the careful art of scrunching.

The second thing I remembered about my prior self is that I spent a lot of years pouring obscene amounts of valuable product down the drain by way of the myth that more is more. More is not more, less is more. Always is.

Before I became educated, I thought that using a handful of shampoo would make me cleaner, or smell better. I smelled great by the way, I'm anal-retentive about scents. Bless my first salon boss ever, Lucia, for keeping me on with all the inventory I must have wasted trying to "give the clients a great shampoo." My intentions were good from the very beginning.

That thought caused me to think about money, Everyone's Favorite Thought. I must have cost that incredibly nice woman a TON of money overusing product on clients. Then, I thought about how much salon-quality shampoos cost. I promote their qualities publicly, and I feel that it's my personal and professional responsibility to tell people that may be like me that a dime-sized amount really is a dime sized amount, and a quarter, and so on and so forth.

Salon-quality shampoo is concentrated. Hence, less is more. In the shower, follow the following routine:

1.) Wet your hair and your hands thoroughly.

2.) Dispense A DIME SIZED AMOUNT of shampoo into your hand.

3.) Rub your hands together as if washing with Handsoap after a very difficult cleaning mission.

4.) Rapidly work your fingers through your hair & scalp to create nice frothy suds. (Stimulating your scalp helps to clear hair follicles and encourage healthy hair growth.)

5.) Rinse THOROUGHLY. Rinse until your hair doesn't feel slippery anymore.

6.) Dispense A QUARTER SIZED AMOUNT of conditioner into your hand.

7.) Rub your hands together until the product is evenly distributed in your hands.

8.) Distribute the conditioner starting at the ends and ending about halfway up; higher if you have thick hair. Less conditioner = More Volume.

9.) Rinse THOROUGHLY. Residual conditioner can create false greasiness. Why tempt fate?

10.) Towel- Dry, apply styling products, and create beauty.

Pretend there's a little Hairoine on your shoulder. I care about your hair. I really do. Taking better care of your hair simply involves creating new habits. In my case, it was learning how to scrunch curls at that tender age so many years ago. It was a small thing to change in my routine compared to the daily frustration that I was living with before. I felt silly afterward for having not known better, but then.... I didn't have an informative and entertaining blog to read either.