Your hair care questions answered – episode 180

Perry Romanowski (0:00)

Hi, I'm Perry, and you're listening to The Beauty Brains.

Welcome to The Beauty Brains, a show where real scientists answer your beauty questions and give you an insider's look to the beauty product industry. This is episode 180 I'm your host, Perry Romanowski, and with me today, my co-host, Valerie George. Hello, Valerie.

Valerie George (0:29)

Hi, Beauty Brains. Hi, Perry.

Perry Romanowski (0:31)

Valerie, we're gonna do a theme show today. It's gonna be all about hair. What do you think of that?

Valerie George (0:38)

Ooh, my favorite. Everybody knows that's my favorite topic, and we have a lot of stuff to talk about today. So I woke up today with a lot of glee.

Perry Romanowski (0:51)

Excellent. And a lot of hair, too.

All right, let's, we got a ton of questions come in about hair, so that's why we thought we'd focus one show today on hair. Maybe in the future, we're gonna do a show on skin, and then we'll do a show on, well, we did that sun care show once, right?

Valerie George (1:06)

Yeah, that was fun. Yeah, but I think we're the right people to talk about hair because we both come from the hair industry.

Perry Romanowski (1:13)

Exactly. So on today's episode, we're gonna be answering your questions about whether hair products that claim to restore natural color in gray hair actually work, how Ouidad curl conditioner works, or how you can make it better. We're gonna talk about products that claim to thicken hair. We'll talk about how you can avoid hair damage, and how you can know what ingredients actually do when they're put into your products. But before we get into that, do we have any topics to discuss today? I actually was looking at your Instagram feed, and it looks like you've been coloring hair.

Valerie George (1:49)

Yeah, well, not actually coloring hair. I'm not a licensed cosmetologist, but I do color my own hair swatches that were once attached to humans.

Yeah, I just like to work on lots of fun hair color, and sometimes if I'm working on a particular shade and it doesn't come out the way I thought it would, I'll set it aside and maybe use it for something for the future. And when I was going through, I have this box, I call it the grave, where all my ugly swatches go, or swatches that didn't really work out for the project I'm working on. All the colors are really pretty. I was going through some of the projects and photographing a couple, but yeah, the colors are my favorite part to work on.

Perry Romanowski (2:34)

So you color hair a lot on the job then?

Valerie George (2:38)

Oh, yeah. Pounds and pounds and pounds of it. You have to buy that hair from a special place and it comes standardized. And that helps me get consistent feedback on what I'm doing in the lab. Is it appropriate to send out to the test salon before we actually send it out? So that's pretty good because sometimes it turns out a little different than I think it will. And even going from swatch to a real human ends up a little more different. So it's definitely saved a lot of people in real life.

Perry Romanowski (3:11)

I imagine it's really hard to know just if you say I'm going to use 10% of this ingredient or 12% of this ingredient to know that percentage difference is how that's going to affect the actual end hair color.

Valerie George (3:22)

It's a little challenging sometimes. You get, we don't use things as high as 10%, but you get an idea of what the end color would be just from experience and understanding the dye chemistry. Like, okay, if I pick this coupler over that coupler, it'll be like slightly more warmer or slightly cooler. But even then, if you have a very specific tonal target in mind, it can take a lot of revisions. And sometimes I have to do it 10 to 12 times before. It's exactly what we're looking for.

Perry Romanowski (3:56)

Well, if you want to see Valerie's hair work, feel free to follow her on Instagram. What's that Instagram account of yours?

Valerie George (4:01)

At cosmetic underscore chemist.

Perry Romanowski (4:03)

Excellent. Well, Valerie, instead of doing a Beauty Science News, since we have so many questions, I thought we would play this comment we had about our show last week. Remember we talked about the online shopping for perfumes and how we didn't understand how that worked?

Valerie George (4:18)

Yeah, that was regarding Michelle Pfeiffer's new brand Henry Rose, and it's a direct-to-consumer.