I’ve got thick & wavy hair which are dry and damaged.

Which product could you propose?
Thank you for asking!
It seems that you will find several of our products very useful and satisfying for your conditions.
Shampoo: IlLustrious….which will help to replace the silicone based ingredients you are probably using to calm your hair currently, and add luster to your hair.  It may tangle a bit at first, but keep going for the 30 days to make sure you get our conditioning agents deep into the cortex!
Conditioner:  RoMANce Deep Conditioning Treatment...  This will start to penetrate fully into the cortex a perfect balance of moisture and strength and start calming the ends.  It will also start to create the shine again from the inside out…   If you are in really dry shape, from color or chemicals, get the VirgINity, because that will instantly repair the hair, thus postponing the need for a trim, and keeping your hair as long as possible, if that is important to you.  It lasts up to 7 shampoos!  Super repairing!

Styling:   It sounds like a job for Simply Straight.  If you  don’t wish a permanent smoothing effect on the waves, then use Taffy instead.   These creams used before blowdrying will transform your hair into bouncing and behaving shiny hair again that resists the humidity and keeps your style for a longer time between shampooings!

Seems like Vanessa Hudgens has the perfect waves….  Using the above, with a large iron held vertically will get your hair looking beautiful, and keeping it as long as possible.

Let us know if you have more questions… and we hope this is helpful to you!

Naturally yours,
Alan and Cheryl

You, Too, Can Be Fun, Fabulous, & Philanthropic with The Blue Thong Society

Find out more about being fun, fabulous, and philanthropic.   Belegenza is proud to sponsor our women leaders at the Blue Thong Society, and will be joining them as they have their Annual Retreat in New York City, May 19th, featuring leading speakers:

• Beth Battaglino/ Executive Director for HealthyWomen
• Barbara Hannah Grufferman / Columnist, Huffington Post; Author, “The Best of Everything After 50″; President, Best of Everything Media, Inc.
• Dr. Suzanne B. Phillips / Psy.D., ABPP,CGP / Psychologist, Psychoanalyst, Author.
• Ellen Douglas / CLU, ChFC / President of Fiscal Wizard, Inc / Financial Planner
• Kelley Connors / President of KC Health and Founder of Real Women on Health
• Mary Jo Wallo / Founder & President of Blue Thong Society

I’ve ordered few Belegenza products like RoMANce Deep conditioner,GrowOut
shampoo and IlLustrious Shampoo and SpotLite Shine Serum and EnCore Leave-In
conditioner. All this hoping i would get long shiny strong voluminous
hair. Btw i’ve experienced heartbreaking hair loss in the past few
months. Now let me state my concerns below.

I’m Indian and we follow a slightly different hair regime. Before
washing our hair, we massage our scalp (and length of our hair) with
oil (in my case all natural almond+castor+coconut and sometimes olive
oil) and let it soak in for some time. Maybe an hour or over. So is is
safe to use your products with these oils. And how effectively will
they remove the oil from my hair ? I’m not questioning the
effectiveness of your products at all. In fact I’ve read all good
things about and do believe that everything Belegenza is remarkable. I
just need recommendations about my hair regime.

Hope to hear from you soon.

I am happy to hear from you, and am sad to hear of your plight with the hair loss.  I think you will be thrilled when I tell you a few things about the products!

Number 1…..  Our principle formulator is Indian Indian, and has guided us with his expertise in Indian hair growth ingredients!   We are very well educated and informed, and are familiar with your regime!

Number 2…… Because of the efficacy of the regimen that you are familiar with already with the oil treatments, we have gone a step further, which is why we are so good at helping with hair growth.  It is from the oils that you mentioned that we have found the magic, and with the advances of science are able to make more penetration into the hair so that you will get even better results!   In other words, we have utilized the smallest molecules of the oils, combined with a few other nutrients that are celebrated by other cultures in a way that has never been done…thus, giving you the best chances possible at getting results!

Number 3…… Add these to your beauty regimen, and keep us posted!
We are so thrilled to hear from you and look forward to a follow-up from you!

Naturally yours,
Alan & Cheryl

P.S. Feel free to ask us more, as we love to share about our products, and especially helping you have gorgeous healthy hair!

Ebony writes:

From Tyra Banks to Jourdan Dunn, supermodels have spoken out about hairstylists behind-the-scenes at fashion shows who simply do not know how to care for ethnic hair. As recently as May of last year, Jourdan Dunn vented on her Twitter account, saying “I swear some people need to learn how to do black hair/skin.”

Even more alarming, Vogue Italia sheds light on the permanent damage done to Black hair on the catwalk. Veteran supermodels like Naomi Campbell and Tyra Banks have suffered from alopecia publicly on account of the toll modeling had on their hair:

Left in the hands of hairstylists deaf to the temperment of Black tresses, Black fashion pioneers have recounted tales of their coils and strands being stretched to their breaking, frayed ends; scalps carelessly permed, harshly scorched, battered with color, and left to be restored by weaves, wigs, and the shearing of frazzled locks [...] This while Black model stalwarts Naomi Campbell and Tyra Banks have fought the effects of alopecia publicly, Banks raising significant awareness to the damaging toll modeling has caused to her hair by going completely natural in 2010.

To be sure, there are a handful of models who have enjoyed wearing their natural strands for decades, including Alek Wek and Noemie Lenior, as Vogue Italia points out. Still, the Fall 2012 Fashion Weeks reveal a documented increase in models like Ajak Deng, Hereith Paul, Nana Keita and Flaviana Mataka parading down the runway in natural hairstyles from New York to Paris. These styles run the gamut from Ajak’s close-cropped, blonde buzz cut to Elyce Cole‘s angular ‘fro, each uniquely textured and exquisite. This rise signals a new climate in which the beauty of textured hair, in its unaltered state, is celebrated on an international scale.

Given my diverse clientele, and having curly hair of my own, I learned what we called back then, Black Hair Care….  I was committed to making curly hair straight in the humid environment of my youth.  When we developed our company, Belegenza, we attended to making products that were excellent for African American hair and all curly textures.  So, what does a blondie know about African American hair????  Don’t let my blonde exterior fool you!  We’ve got thousands of satisfied ethnic customers who prove our point!

Alan

Loves the new color on the ends!  I saw this at Glamour.com .   I like it, but I have to ask about what happens when it grows out and fades?  Of course, these are probably extensions, but not everyone will have it done as extensions, and will have their natural hair done this way.  When the natural hair grows, and the pink fades, what's a girl to do?  I think it competes with the bag, and as it changes tones of pink, what about the rest of one's wardrobe?  With her connections and budget,  I doubt she's worried!

If you choose to do this either to your natural hair or extensions, we want to remind you that we can keep color fresh and vibrant longer than any synthetics on the market, so make sure before you shampoo these fashion colors, drench them in SpotLite Shine S500 Serum.  Then, lock it in with VirgINity Hair Repair for super shine and body.  It will make the extensions look more real, too!

Alan

Christelyn:   Since I did a demonstration on Belegenza’s Simply Straight on Maxi-Me’s hair, there’s been a lot of questions that we’ve been getting. This latest one, along with Alan Eschenburg’s answer, might be helpful for those who still have some questions and concerns.

Hello,

I have african american keratin treated hair. I have a few questions about the Simply straight product.  How does the product work? Is it a treatment that I do once a months? weekly? daily?

Are the result permanent? How long do the results lasts?  I saw that its compatible with keratin treated hair, Is there a different set of instructions to following for keratin treated hair? After treating my hair with simply straight,do I have to use  sufur free, chloride free shampoo in order to avoid reverting my hair?…( meaning to avoid making the hair curl back again)

Thank for answering my questions.

P.S: I saw a lady online who used the product on her daughter who is natural and its turned out amazing!!! I’m very curious about your products

Here’s Alan’s response…

Dear Nadia,

Thanks for you questions. Here are my “Simply Straight Answers.” LOL…

It is very compatible with the keratin treatments. In fact we came out with it to extend the life of relaxers, keratins and other treatments. In doing so, we found that using a Vitamin C complex was a very gentle softening agent to curl patterns. It takes several uses to get a “permanently” uncurled with out product and on virgin/natural hair, it would require many applications over a month to really straighten out the hair. On already treated (keratin or relaxed) it works to make that type of hair supremely healthy and shiny and hold the straightness even in bad humidity!

Also, that Keratin requires salt-free products, we have only made salt-free products from the get-go, given that salt is only used to make products lather more and cheaply at that. We’ve spared no expense, and given that salt is what removes the keratin from the hair, we never allow it in any of our products… so you are safe with us!

How to use is up to you. If you are like me, trying something new can be scary, and I am very conservative with hair, as it is an expensive investment of money, time, and is our crowning glory. I don’t like taking chances, so a little is better in my approach. The thing I would do is to use the Simply Straight (SS) as a blow dry cream on your next styling appointment. If your hair is medium length, I would use about 1 pump worth for the whole head on clean, wet hair. It is very thick, so rub the cream in your hands really well to emulsify and then start blotting your hands on your wet hair to distribute it as evenly as possible. When you start drying you will feel the difference and see that it is more manageable. The next time you shampoo and style, you can adjust it by adding more or less depending on the learning you have gotten from the first application.

If you find that all is good, and you want to smooth out problem areas, like the hair around the hairline or “kitchens” (LOL), you can add more to those spots. If you want to amp up the effect of the process all over, you can also apply it on wet hair, cover it in a plastic cap, and let it sit up to 3 hours! 3 hours sounds like a long time, but what you will find is that it is NOT a relaxer, so you don’t have to worry about breakage! Because you will have experienced it as a blow dry cream, you will find the unique and fantastic conditioning quality that it has, and you will be very comfortable in using it in the more advanced ways….

Nadia… I hope that I have addressed your concerns. Feel free to ask for more clarification if I have not answered it to your satisfaction.

AND, thank you again for inquiring. Also, you can pull up other questions and answers on our website by going to www.belegenza.com and in the search box, type in your questions for more information as well!

Again, Nadia, thank you!
Alan

Natural hair is certainly a new world of hair to deal with given that the ethnic woman has been suppressed by the media that natural hair is not the most beautiful.  Well, we beg to differ.  We love seeing the natural beauty of women and feel that natural hair is one of the features that makes a woman that much more enticing and intriguing.  We wanted to afford every woman the ability to have options with her styling, thus the Simply Straight, is a way to afford complete control of the hair, and the option to leave it natural so that when she changes her mind in a month or two, her hair is in the best condition ever so that she has the choice to make a change without having to cut it off, or be imprisoned to chemical relaxer treatments!

Welcome to the natural hair world of Belegenza!

Alan

The Reason I Still Have Hair on My Head: Belegenza
So I have platinum hair.  And as much as I wish I could say it is real, it’s not.  Alan Eschenburg is my colorist and Belegenza is his brain child.  Yes, you have probably never heard of it, but I am 100% sure my bleached white hair is on my head because of these silicone-free, organic products. I live on a steady stream of Illustrious and Transfix Shampoos, Romance Conditioner (a STAR product, runs circles around any other conditioner), Spotlite Shine (silicone free shine serum) and Simply Straight. The fact that I have been platinum for 7 years and my hair is still half way down my back is a miracle of the gods.  I also swear by his Simply Young spray for my mug.  He’s got the most insane secret formulas and the most insane secret chemist.  So all ya’ll with a color addiction like moi, GET YOU SOME!  Ok, I will stop gushing now.
To see more, click here

Thanks to my incredible Belegenza team, we are making the world a happier and more beautiful place.  It’s our pleasure, Sally…thank you.

Alan

Transcribed from “From Behind the Chair with Alan Eschenburg”  on www.wgrnradio.com

A: Welcome.  This is Alan Eschenburg ‘From Behind the Chair’ and I’ve been in this business for almost 30 years and I learned something way, way back, 30 years ago when I started studying that if listened, listened, listened, I was going to learn just about everything I needed to know, or at least I’d have in my chair who I could find it out from.  And it’s been absolutely true all through the years, standing behind the chair is not only fun for me but it’s also very enticing and interesting and today I have a very, very special guest who is a colleague and associate of mine, who stands behind the chair but not just any kind of chair.  She stands behind what we call the Upper East Side chair.  She’s got some information and some stories that are going to blow you away.  And not only that, she’s got a great book out called ‘Tales from the Chair”.  And I’m so excited to welcome my guest, Pam Massaro.  Pam welcome to the show.

P: Hi Alan.  How are you today?

A: I’m so thrilled and excited.  I have had the privilege of getting one of the copies of your book immediately and I have just loved, loved, loved listening to the stories that happen from your perspective.  We’ve known each other for several years and I just want to applaud your efforts for creating a book to really, really share with people what it’s like to be in the salon.  And this book is not only interesting for those who sit in the chair but those who stand behind the chair as well, because this is the kind of stuff that’s in the gossip magazines, but you really, really give us the real stories.  So I’m going to poke in right here and ask you to give us the real dirt because I know you were very, very appropriate with the people you’re talking about.  You didn’t give names, so maybe we won’t get some names out of you and we won’t necessarily know who the story belongs to but let’s talk first about your credentials.  I know you as one of the top colorists in the world.  You work for the major manufacturers, teaching hair color across the world and you’re just incredible….so tell us about your illustrious career in the world of hair color first.  Who do you work for and who listens to you?

P: When I first started in the industry, I was always fascinated with color.  I’m an artist. I paint. I draw. I went to art school.  And when I first started, there really was no way to go as an artist and I knew I’d be a poor, starving artist, living in the Village somewhere.  So it kind of spun into hair color.  And from there, when I decided I really, really wanted to do this, I researched all the top salons in Manhattan and I came across a salon called Kenneth’s.  This salon was famous for doing all the socialites in New York City, one of which, unfortunately, may she rest in peace, was Jackie Onassis.  So I went there, a fresh-faced kid and here I am, I applied for the job, and I got it.  I was an apprentice to incredible colorists for actually 4 years. I met Mrs. Onassis may, many times.  I worked on her many, many times.  I then met one VIP after another, from Rockefeller, Pierpont, Astor…..the list would go on and on. All the dress designers would come in there.  I met Lauren Bacall.  We had some really incredible clients.   We were in a townhouse.  We were 5 floors.  It was like a special place.  One day it was really great….Mrs. Onassis would come in with her trademark scarf and her big Jackie O sunglasses and she’d come into the lobby and then she’d get into this little quaint elevator we had which took her up to the 4^th floor.  Well one day President Johnson’s wife came.  Her name was Lady Bird if you remember.  Well I wouldn’t know who Lady Bird was if I fell over her.  So she’s in the elevator with me and all of a sudden, the secret service gets in the elevator with me and I’m looking to see ‘who is this person?’ because I didn’t know who she was.  And we come up in the elevator and got off at the 4^th floor and I turn and I see this other secret service guy huffing, running up the staircase, so while 2 of them were in the elevator with us, 2 more had run up the staircase to get there by the time she landed on the 4^th floor.  And I just thought it to be so funny.  Here was Jackie, in the salon, everyone knows who she is, and because she married Onassis, she was not entitled to secret service anymore.  So if she didn’t get a private security guard, she would just walk off the street, and tourists all the time would chase her into the salon.  But here is Lady Bird, and nobody knows who she is, because she was married to a president, she got security.  I thought it was a hoot.  It was very, very funny.  So I started at ‘Kenneth’s’ and I got an incredible education.  I think it gave me my credentials for the rest of my career because working with a clientele like that, I believe you could probably work with anyone and it was just an amazing 4 years and from there I went to ‘La Coupe’ which was a very, very big name in our industry and then I went to a private salon for a few years and then I went to ‘Warren Tricomi,’ which everyone knows.  I stayed there for a few years and now I’m on East 57^th Street in a wonderful, charming little salon called ‘Frederico’.  And that’s where I am now.

A: So you were of course 4 years old when you started.

P: Oh at least 4.

A: Yes because everyone’s going to start to do the maths and go wow!  And you look fantastic.  And also, while all this is going on, you’re an educator as well.  You get to travel across the country and teach your techniques.  Say more about that.

P: I’m an educator for 2 different companies.  I’m an educator for one of the Keratin companies, ….Braziliana.  I’m director of education for that company.  I travel all over the United States for them and I certify people and teach them the training that’s necessary to learn how to do these treatments properly.  And, now especially with all the controversy that’s going on in the papers, with showing how to promote products that are safe, not only for the hair stylist but also for the public.  So working with products that are formaldehyde-free.  Our company is on the forefront of the latest, latest technology.  And 2 weeks ago, I just took another class, for an incredible product called ‘Evolve’.  Hair extensions, pieces, cannot be put in the front part of our head because you can always see them.  So this company found a way of doing the weft  very, very thin that actually can be integrated with your own hair and it’s woven in without being bonded with glue or anything like that and it becomes a part of your hair and every day when you brush it, it actually tightens it and it’s very tedious to learn how to do it but once it’s on, it’s absolutely amazing.  We just launched it at the Waldorf Astoria, at the Intercoiffure show, which, for the benefit of the public, Intercoiffure is the most prestigious organization in my industry.  So if you become a member of it, or if you launch one of your products there, you’re launching to hair stylists that are the top-notch hair stylists in the world who come to see these shows.  And we launched at that show and we were an incredible success. Our girls came out on the stage in kimonos and they walked to the center of the stage, paused, they had a fan drawn across their face.  They stopped and on the fan, you could see a picture of what they looked like before.  They would get to the end of the stage and the music would stop and they’d take the fan down and you saw them with this new hair.  And behind them is a screen, so people in the audience can really see the close-up.  These girls looked so amazing, I can’t even tell you.  Their lives would change overnight.  Some people who had alopecia which is, to people who don’t understand what that is, is where our hair falls out but in large, large amounts and it’s a horrible thing to happen.  Sometimes the hair never returns back to normal.  So for these women, they’re just got a new lease on life.  And it’s an incredible thing to do.  So I’m an educator for that now.

A: I can’t wait to come and have you show me that technique.  I can’t wait to come over and see that on a live person.  So you’ve worked a lot in the color arena.  You’ve worked with all these different companies.  Teaching with all these different companies in the color industry.  Is there one that you would particularly pick?

P: My favorite is Goldwell.

A: Are you an educator for them as well?

P: Presently no.  I was for a while but not presently.

BREAK

A: Pam you can tell a great story.  You’ve just told the story of giving women a new lease on life with their hair and the organization you were talking about.  Let’s dig in a little bit….you tell some stories from your book ‘Tales from the Chair’ that are surprising and really, really juicy.  So to highlight, these are the stories you’re not going to hear in the gossip magazines because they’re really in-depth and you get the whole background into what’s really going on.  You’re there getting all these stories and you put yourself in the heart of the Upper East Side where so many stories have come from.  Give us a little taste of what your favorite chapters are in the book.

P: To be honest with you, I’m going to digress for just a second.  The reason I did this book….it happened by accident.  A client, a young girl, was telling me a story about a date that she’d had the weekend prior and the hair stylist that sat in the chair next to me…..you can kind of overhear conversations sometimes…..so he turned and he was laughing because he could hear what she was saying to me and I remember turning to him, and saying it even in front of her, ‘I wondered if anyone heard this whether they’d even believe it’ because it was so funny.  She was talking to me about a guy that she met, an artist, downtown in an art gallery, and how she went home with him.  And to make a long story short, he liked to play like he was a bird.  Well we believe he used a drug to do something to them because this girl said she got a little too high, a little too quickly, so she thinks he maybe put something in her drink but she wasn’t really sure.  She was sitting on his couch and all of a sudden, she said she looked up and a cage came down from the ceiling.   She said his whole ceiling looked like the Arabian Nights, draped, and a big, cold, gilded cage came out of the ceiling.  And around the couch it encircled, and she says there she is sitting in the middle of a cage and she’s thinking ‘oh my god, what is going on?’  All of a sudden he says to her ‘I’ll be right back’ and he walks through the door of the cage and disappears to the back part of the apartment.  She said she’s sitting there, what do I do?  Do I stay?  Do I go?  She’s thinking of all these scenarios in her head and she really liked him so she says ‘what the hell, I’ve got nothing to lose’.  And she was really smashed as this point she told me.  He comes back with a box in his hand and hands it to her.  She opens the box and in it is a costume with feathers and he asks her to put it on.  And then walks away again.  She opens the box and is looking at the costume and it’s a little bra with the nipples cut out and a little g-string, all in features and that’s the costume.  So I said to her, what did you do?  She said she put it on because I had nothing to lose.  He was cute.  I said ‘ok’ to myself.  He then comes back in the room and she said she almost died.  He was dressed as a big yellow bird, covered in feathers from head to toe and everything had a feather on except you know what.  He comes into the cage and he starts telling her, I want you to be my bird, my pet in the gilded cage and he’s saying all this crazy stuff.  I said what did you do, he’s nuts?  She said I went along with it.  I was fun.  And I thought this girl is crazy.  I couldn’t believe what she was saying.  Then she went into this whole scenario about how he started to get a little bit too crazy, so she put the breaks on it and then said ‘I think I have to leave’ so she actually left with the costume.  She ran out of his apartment, 4 o’clock in the morning, in this costume, down the cobbled stone streets in the pouring rain looking for a taxi.  She saw one all the way down the block. She gets into the cab with a driver with a turban on and she says ‘you know how they hate us.  Of course I was laughing like crazy.  She’s slouched down in the back of the cab and gave her address.  She said all he kept doing was looking at her through the mirror trying to get a peak.  And she went home.  Well that girl left.  A month later, another client comes in my chair.  About the same age, all of a sudden she starts talking and she starts telling me again….’you’re not going to believe this guy I met…’  All of a sudden, I’m listening to her and its like déjà-vu, I’ve been here before and I said ‘wait a minute, stop.  Was he an artist?’ She looks at me and says yes.  I said ‘does he live downtown?’ ‘Yes’. So everything I’m asking, she’s saying ‘yes’ to.  I said ‘did you put the costume on?’  She said ‘how did you know?’  I couldn’t believe it.  It was the same guy.  She’s saying ‘you’re kidding me?  I wasn’t the only one?’  I said ‘honey, I doubt if you’re the only one’  So we were just laughing for 10 minutes straight and I went home that night and I wrote in a little notebook, the 2 stories because they were so funny and so different.  And in the back of my mind I said I should put this in something like a book and I kind of filed it away in my mind and then one day I said to myself I need to write a book.  I hear so many funny stories.  I head sad stories.  All kinds of things and that’s what our industry is – it’s to create, make women beautiful and to listen to them.  I probably know more about my client than her husband, her boyfriend, her fiancé, her rabbi, her priest.  I could guarantee you I know more about her.  So that’s why I did it.

A: Unbelievable. And thank goodness.  You know I hear that all the time.  It’s true.  We stand behind the chair and had I false teeth, they would have fallen to the floor so many times by now.  I’m always riveted.  And there’s something extraordinary here in that one story that you’ve told us is that you attracted 2 of those people that were attracted by a big bird.

P: Exactly.  Wherever Mr. yellow bird is he’s not on Sesame Street, believe me

A: We also want to put a disclaimer in the show that this has nothing to do with Sesame Street so please don’t’ email me about the big bird from Sesame Street.

A: So Pam you’ve got story after story after story and some of these people are celebrities.  Can you talk about any of those?  Can you drop any names because people want to know?

P: There’s one or two in the book that I speak about but what I really wanted to do with this book is I’ve done many, many celebrities and I’ve been there but I wanted to do Upper East Side girls.  I wanted someone to pick up the book and say ‘wow, maybe I could do that’ or ‘maybe I’ve been there’.  I wanted people not only to see how the Upper East Side lives but also to be able to compare things with their lives on different levels.  So, the few celebrities that are in the book, I really can’t drop names on them because of disclaimers – just like big bird – I can’t.  There is one that I did, who came into our salon, who was an older celebrity who was a sex symbol.  She was famous.  Her name was up there with Marilyn Munroe and she came in one day and my boss at the time, the man who owned the salon, he was very dramatic, very flamboyant.  She came in and sat down and proceeded to tell him all the things she wanted him to do and on his station, she took out pieces of hair, clip-ons and she said to him before you start, I need to do something.  She took out a roll of tape and taped the back of her ear to the back of her neck and her face looked like a mini face lift…..20 years off your face.  She did it on both sides and we were watching her in the mirror.  She looked totally different.  Then she took a piece of cord, like a string, and did the same thing and put it behind her ear, over the top of her head, and behind the back of her ear and pulled it again.  And then he starts blow-drying her hair and she’s telling him to put this piece of hair here……  She was telling him exactly where she wanted every single piece of hair.  I swear when he’d finished, she looked 25 years younger.  She looked absolutely amazing and she was telling him how she had this fabulous date for the night and I was thinking to myself after she left what did she do when the guy woke up in the middle of the night?  Did any of that stuff fall off? Did he wake up and she mysteriously wasn’t in the room or….I mean what did she do to keep this look from falling off all night.   I was dying.  I just thought it was absolutely fabulous.  I just wanted to know all her secrets.

A: Does her first name start with an ‘s’? Because I think I’ve heard about this person before.

P: Ah, yes.

A: I cannot believe it.  I worked with a make-up artist who told me that very same story who had to do her hair for her for an event in Houston.

P: This is very funny because another friend of mine who was in Texas, in Austin, did her on a movie set recently.  That is a small world.

A: So that leads us to the next question.  You have tales from the chair but I also want to hear about what happens in the back room of a salon.

BREAK

A: I know you couldn’t make this stuff up.  And just as we’ve distinguished, you just told the story about a client in the salon that you witnessed, and I too have heard this story from other stylists and this woman is a celeb and really has created an illusion that’s extraordinary.  That leads me to my next question.  Tell us about the back room because I’ve been in the back room of salons myself for 30 years and I would never tell. But you could tell us some stories.  I walked into the back room recently and witnessed a conversation that was pretty extraordinary.  I don’t know if you want to talk about that one but tells us about the fascination with this back room stuff in the salons.

P:  The back room in any salon is a place where hairdressers unwind and they’ll go back there if they’re having a really hard time with the client to just vent and scream or just dish on whoever and clients know not to go back there but they always want to.  So they could walk in and see anything.  In the last salon I worked in, I worked with several, young, very pretty gay boys and they were always showing pictures to one another on their iPads and one day a client came in and right on the iPad he was holding it up for someone else to see, who’s about 2 feet away from him, and there it is big and bold and in color, somebody’s private parts.  And he’s saying ‘wow, did you see the size of this one’ and bang, the door opens and who comes in but the client – and one of the most chic clients in the salon – and he walks in to see a man’s penis in 8” x 10”, glossy picture.  Everyone burst out laughing because there was nothing else you could do at that point.  Her eyes went right to the iPad and we all started laughing because it was so funny and she said ‘oh my god’ and then ran out of the room.  It was just the best and she’ll never come in there again, I’m sure of that.

A: Or maybe she will…..

P: Or maybe she will looking for more pictures.

A:  Pam, I had no idea you were going to tell that story.  Another disclaimer for those who are under-age listening, we didn’t mean to offend anyone so please don’t take this as the gospel.  This is just the kind of noisy stuff that might happen in a typical salon atmosphere and salon owners, this doesn’t mean it’s happening in your salon either, ha ha.  I remember back in the old days when it came to doing hair color, mostly in the back room for us it was like a prayer alter because we so much didn’t know what we were doing with hair color back in the day that it was almost like we would put the color on out in the salon and run to the back room to say our prayers hoping it would turn out.  Did you ever have any of those?

P: When I’m a stickler.  I’m pretty anal about the business and I studied really, really hard to get where I am and color is the most difficult thing to do in our industry and the salons I’ve worked in, we had to separate and you either became a colorist or you became a stylist.  You were not permitted to do both.  Everything was a separate department and New York is one on those cities where all the top prestigious salons separate.  L.A. is the same way.  A lot of the big cities followed suit with this and I see more and more salons, especially when I travel as an educator, I go to them and I see so many people that are not trained properly in our industry.  And there are people doing color that really shouldn’t be doing it and my heart goes out sometimes and I wish they would learn more before they take on these things because I’m proud of what I do and I want people to look their best and I would never do something if I didn’t feel comfortable doing it.  If a client said to be I want to be a specific color that I know in my heart is not going to work on her, I’m going to do my best to try to talk her out of it without insulting her or hurting her but I’m not going to try and do a job that I know is impossible to do, or its going to break her hair or do something like that just for the money.  That I won’t do either.  There are a lot of people unfortunately in this industry and in any profession that have no integrity.

A: Well Pam you’re pointing to something here because up until now we’ve been jovial and a little backbiting, and over the top with everything, but underneath you have a foundation of professionalism that you’re talking about here.  And I want to highlight that because those professionals who are listening in, I want to make sure they are proud of what we are talking about in a certain sense.  There is so much noise about how awful stylists can be with the things they do to people and a lot of times, we are held hostage by our clients in the chair when they demand to look like a picture and then they have another picture in their own minds of what they are going to turn out like and then they press us to do things that are maybe inappropriate like you said….it’s not going to turn out ……and the stylist or colorist especially may not have the tool set, so to speak, the capacity for delivering that color and that person walks out unhappy and the next thing you know, they’re in the next salon gossiping about that stylist.  And my heart goes out for those kids just like you said because I’ve spent 30 years studying color myself – when I was studying hair color in the first few years, I would take different textures of hair and apply the exact same color to the different textures of hair to find that it never came out the same and then started comparing it with the color spectrum that was in photography and print so that I could see that no wonder there was a discrepancy with the color that showed up on the hair and the color that was present in the printed pages that they were showing me.  So thank you for highlighting that.  You’ve been studying color as an artist but how many years do you think it took you to get to a comfort level where you really felt like you were doing color in the way you knew possible?

P: I’ve always been comfortable doing it but I probably would say, in this business, you need a minimum, at least 10 years under your belt before you can really let loose as a colorist, because you’ve so much to learn.  I work technically because you have to mix products technically but visually I formulate like I was going to do a painting.  I will mix colors in my mind as if I had a canvas and I was actually mixing paint.  So I know if a client is grey, I need to put 50% of the base color in and 50% of tone in the hair.  I know technically I need to mix these products together to get what I want but in my mind, it’s on a canvas.  And I’m saying if I take a little golden blond and I mix a touch of cool blond and I put that in there, it’s not going to be so warm.  I think of it as paint.  It’s a visual thing for me.   I create that way.

A: Have you ever made any mistakes on anybody’s hair?

P: Sure.  We all have.  If a colorist tells me they haven’t, they’re lying.  It’s real simple.  I had a big surprise for me 5 years into the business and henna was really popular then and I had a client come in and she wanted her hair done.  Her hair was pretty dark, almost black.  She wanted highlights.  She wanted something that looked real funky. I said to her, to be honest, your hair is really, really dark, to put highlights in its not going to look good. I don’t want to put blond in your hair because that’s really not going to look good.  I said maybe a deeper brown on top of it would look pretty.  She said ok.  So I start putting highlights in and I walk away having finished wrapping them on her head.  Then I come back to check where I first put the foil in and I open it and the top part of her hair is this beautiful warm color brown and the bottom part of her hair is bright blue.  Well, I open another foil.  Same thing.  The bottom part, bright blue.  So now I realize I’m in trouble.  So I say to her, I felt something in your hair and when I asked you, you said you hadn’t done anything with your hair for quite a long time.  She said ‘oh well 2 or 3 months ago I had henna in my hair but that doesn’t really count because that’s not color.’  So I asked what color henna had she put in her hair.  She said ‘I put the dark one, the black one’.  And hence the blue.  Henna, if you try to lift it with any kind of bleach or any kind of developer, if it’s a dark henna, it will come out blue.  So the bottom part of her head was blue and there was nothing I could do to get it out.  So she had a very short haircut done that day needless to say.  And I was really lucky that she was ok with it.  She could have tried to blame me for that one.  But it does happen to us.

A: Yes that misinformation.  We have to quantify it with so much going on all the time.   I think that’s why we have to have such an extraordinary sense of humor at the end of the day.  Correct me if I’m wrong, there is so much information we have to get educated in and like you said, 10 years of background under our belt.  And that means with an apprentice who can really teach us.  Because not only are we dealing with the chemistry of it, but we’re dealing with the psychology of it, we’re dealing with communication skills, we’re dealing with the physics of the hair, the possibility that it melts off, the possibility that we can ever deliver the picture we think they are trying to tell us they want it to look like.  All that and then we’ve got to keep our wits about us when the ends turn blue and smooth their feathers so that they’re not upset at the end of the day.  And then we’ve got to get paid somehow.  So there’s an extraordinary toolbox of things that a colorist really needs to learn.  I don’t know about you, but I can do 15 heads a day that are really fantastic and if there’s a little tone that’s off, that flavors my day.  Does that happen to you?

P: Yes I’m the same way.  I’m my own worst enemy.  I’m such a perfectionist that if I have a day where I’m off for some reason and we all have those days, I will beat myself up with I should have done this, I could have done it better.  I’m a perfectionist like you.  So yes, I will beat myself up for that.

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A: You know Pam, the back room to me is like the kitchen in the house….everyone wants to be in the kitchen when the party’s going on. I love walking in and catching the action going on in different salons as well.  I can definitely see the fascination with it.  I think the thing you have provided here is a new perspective with your stories.  Some are so outrageous but some of them can be, like you said, mapped on to the goings-on in every salon.  It’s almost like the salon is a sanctuary or, what would you call it?  It’s a place where people go….why is there so much gossip, why is there so much of that lay-it-on-the-line stuff?  Do you have an idea of why that happens so much in the salons?

P: Definitely.  The contact we have with the client is so personal.  There are 2 things that happen.  There’s contact by touch where our hands are on the client’s head, so that ‘s where the touch is involved.  When you touch someone, already a bond has been formed.  There’s a closeness that happens.  Then, psychologically, you’re talking to the client. ‘why do you want to do this to your hair?  What are you trying to achieve?’ And most of the time, they will start explaining to you ‘well my hair used to be this color’.  Or they’ll tell you a story about themselves, why they want this specific thing.  And sometimes the pictures will come out. ‘This is a picture of so and so’s wedding and I looked great.  I was 20 lbs thinner”.  There’s usually a story that goes with it.  So they’re sharing more things with you so you now you have the physical touch and you have the psychological bond.  So you’re bonding twice with them.  When I give a consultation to a client, I come behind the chair and now I’m looking at them in the mirror in front of me.  If I stayed just in that position, there would be no bonding.  I watch people do this.  I don’t do this.  As soon as I come up behind a client, my hands go on their shoulders, so already I’ve diffused the awkwardness, or if the client is a little uncomfortable, they are comfortable now because I’ve touched them.  Then I come around to the front of the station and I look at them directly face to face.  And I either try to come down to their level because they’re sitting.  Sometimes if the chair is vacant next to them, I’ll sit in it.  Or I will come down and look at them directly and get eye contact.  And I’ve found that the bonding right there is so intense that we have with the client, they become comfortable and I can guarantee you, an hour later, 99% of the clients that will sit in my chair will confide in me and tell me something about themselves that normally they would never tell someone else.

A: Those men who are listening to this show….you may want to take note of what Pam is talking about here and she how you can incorporate it into your dating scene or even your marriage or the relationship of your dreams because those are pearls of wisdom.  Now that I’m looking back at my own way of operating in the salon from behind the chair myself, I didn’t necessarily know that’s what I was doing but now that you mention it, I really do relate to the people from standing behind the chair, from all angles like you said, but we’re in relationship for long term.  I really get my feelings hurt when someone leaves and they don’t tell me they’re leaving.  I’ve had people who’ve moved and I didn’t know that and I thought they were just upset with some work that maybe I didn’t provide for them or something and then to find out that it was simply that they moved and they just didn’t think I cared.  And I really do.  Do you ever get your feeling hurt when a client leaves?  I’m assuming you do….

P: Absolutely.  Just recently I moved salons and I thought ‘I wonder if they will follow me.  I wonder if they will come’.  And prior to that happening, I had to go to the doctor.  I had an appointment that I had to keep and I’d been trying to get this appointment for several weeks.  So I only found out the night before, really late, that I had this appointment and the next morning I had a client that was the first one on my book and there was no way I could do her hair because I had to be at this appointment – literally an hour later.  So when I called the salon, I said could you please apologize to her for me and either I can come back after the appointment or I’ll come in whatever day she wants to take care of her.  I said please, please apologize.  It was really, really important that I kept this appointment and I don’t do things like that.  That’s not my MO.  And she was so annoyed that I did this to her, she told the receptionist that she would never come back to the salon.  I said to myself afterwards that really hurts my feelings because I had been doing her a very long time.  Here I am, I had to go to the doctor.  I had a really serious appointment I had to keep and her hair was more important and I said to myself that is such a shallow person but it still hurt my feelings if you know what I mean.

A: Certainly.  I had a similar thing just happen Friday.  I had a client in another city call me and say ‘I’m here’.  And I said ‘so am I’, but we were in different cities.  I wrote in on my book when I saw her last and then when my schedule changed and my flights changed, I just didn’t remember to reschedule it in my book.

P: It happens.

A: I’m so embarrassed but thank goodness she was so gracious with me.  I was lucky but I lost 2 days of it kept popping up into my mind.  I didn’t know how she was going to respond.  Was she going to divorce me with no papers?  I tell people, if you leave me, at least send me a divorce notice so that I know when you’re gone.  I hope to learn something from it, to see where I made a mistake if I made a mistake.  So thanks for sharing that.  Is there anything that you don’t want people to know about you?

P:  That I don’t want people to know about me?

A: Yes.  Any little secret that you don’t want people to know?  I’m just putting you on the spot because we’re so intimate with our clients.  I just want to give you that opportunity to share something that we don’t want to people to know about.  It can be something simple.

P: I’m pretty much an open book.  I’m the kind of person that if you do find out something, so be it.  I’m not critical of people.  We all have skeletons in our closet. Some have more bones than others.  Back in the day, we all were bad, we were all doing things we shouldn’t have been doing and the list goes on and on.  We’re from the ‘80s, when the clubs were outrageous when we hung out in them.  The clubs are mild nowadays.  The kids nowadays can’t do what we did.  They have every precaution in the world they have to take.  We didn’t have to.

A: It’s incredible because you’re also demonstrating your work ethic.  I remember one stylist, when I was just coming up and she’d been around 10 -15 years in the business and she was partying so hard, I said ‘girl, honey……’ She said ‘I work this hard, so I party this hard’.  There’s something you’ve been pointing to this whole time and it’s that you work hard.  And I don’t mean that you labor necessarily in an inefficient way but you really get to the meat of the matter.  Even going so far as to do something so unique and so extraordinary to write a book and share with us.  You’ve been so generous with it but also so appropriate although we’ve been telling stories that not everyone wants to hear.  You’ve really been appropriate in protecting people’s anonymity and their personhood and their stardom and celebrity hood.  Thank you for being so appropriate at all times and demonstrating that the salon atmosphere is yes a gossipy place and it can be done responsibly.  It can be appropriately and it can be done to make a difference.  You’re really making a difference now and I want to thank you for that.

P: Thank you.

A: The other thing is that I really love how you’ve shared your humanity with us and I know I’ve put you on the spot here a couple of times and you shared what you wanted.  Your resiliency is dynamic.  I know how tough it is to be a stylist.  I know how tough it is to be a colorist particularly.  And to be one of the tops in the world.  To be the person the magazines come to for what’s the latest and the greatest, what’s going to happen next and how do we accomplish that, you’re one of those go-to people and I really admire you and thank you for being a full expression of a colorist in the world.  Its no wonder you were at Intercoiffure.  It’s no wonder people come to you.  Your work ethic is amazing.  Your artistic creativity is amazing.  You’ve spanned many arenas now.  You’ve gone from painter, to colorist to author.  And it’s really, really inspiring to me.

P: Thank you so much and you’ve done the same thing and you’re an entrepreneur, which I think is absolutely incredible and I love you dearly.

A: Thank you.  Thank you.  Pam, it’s been an incredible, incredible show.  Thank you so much.  Listeners, we didn’t tell you how to get in touch with Pam but you can simply go to Facebook/PamMassaro.  You can find her, you can find out about her book ‘Tales from the Chair’.  It’s a great read.  It’s a fun read.

P: It’s on Amazon Alan, or Barnes and Noble.

A: That’s fabulous.  You’re famous.  And thank you for sharing all that great stuff.  I look forward to our listeners reading the book and feeding back.  And I suspect that even though the book says ‘the end’, I have a suspicion it is not the very end.

P: No it’s not!

A: So I look forward to the next book.  I look forward to the next time we meet.  Pam thanks again for being on the show and thank you everyone for listening to ‘From behind the Chair’.

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EnCore is our only conditioner that is really designed as a leave-in conditioner, which is based on RoMANce Deep Conditioning Treatment….If you have fine hair, we recommend to use it only on the most damaged portions of the hair, until you have repaired the hair enough to stop using it.