​Turn heads with this time-saving sultry bombshell hair style. Look like you’ve just emerged from the pages of a Victoria Secret catalog and make the street your catwalk. You don’t have to see your stylist every morning or spend a lot of money on expensive products and tools by following these effortless steps, you can achieve Victoria Secret model hair at home.

While You’re Washing

When prepping over a sink or in the shower, skip the conditioner this time, or go very sparingly-focusing only on unruly ends. Conditioner smooths the hair shaft helping it lie flat which is not what you want when you’re pumping up the volume on this look.

If skipping conditioner scares you off because of the frizz factor, focus on the brush you’re using. The wrong brush could be your main culprit in taming an unruly mane.

A special ionic brush or any made with boar bristles is ideal and the bigger and rounder the better for this look. Using a few different sizes can help make the look more natural.

Be sure to include a little heat protector before blowing out. It’s important to blow dry using maximum heat because damp hair causes frizz. There’s a wide range of products to choose from to protect hair from heat styling damage, Keratin offers a color safe styling cream.

For lightweight volume, try a bit of mousse focusing on roots and ends to achieve better style hold, using sparingly throughout the rest of your hair. This will give you a voluminous blow dry effect without weighing down strands in heavy product.

How to do a Hollywood Hair Blowout

Now that your hair is clean and perfectly prepped, it’s time to turn the air on. Be sure you’re equipped with the best tool for the job, a hair dryer with different heat settings can help.

Many of the hair dryer models these days offer features like negative ions that help diffuse frizz and maximize shine without slathering on conditioner and lots of product.

Do the Kelly Kapowski

For this preliminary quick dry, flip your hair in the opposite direction to the way you usually wear it giving you an exaggerated Saved by the Bell look, stay with me here this isn’t the final stage.

Before brush styling, finger comb and flip and dry to remove most of the moisture for this step. Drying upside down can help add extra body too. Come back up for air when hair is mostly dry and full of body–don’t worry about the look yet, you just want max hair volume.

Splitting Up

When hair is no longer soaking wet and manageable, it’s time to break it up into smaller sections. Use duck bill clips to organize hair into sections, and a concentrator attachment on your blow dryer. Most models come with, or you can find universal attachments to fit like the Diane Universal Dryer Concentrator.

This is where your round brush comes into play. Pull small sections of hair taut around brushing upward and spinning, focusing the hot concentrated air downward to set the style. For a general hair tutorial on round brushing check out Zinniah’s tips:         

The most important factor to focus on when round brush drying is to make sure your roots are dry, if they are still damp when you set your style, your look will lose shape throughout the day and fall flat. As you finish heat drying a section blast each with a brief shot of cold air to set the sexy style.

As you wrap the hair around the brush and release it, as an option you can pin the curl into shape with bobby pins or soft duck bill clips, to lock in longer lasting style. Large velcro hair rollers also work to hold hair in place and set while you focus on other sections.

Start from the bottom finishing up at your crown sectioning it off into a pentagon shape. When blow drying the crown sections always ensure you are brushing hair upward and away from your face rolling the brush to dry curls facing a backward direction for the best volume.

Your Crowning Glory

Focus on the very front crown piece for the bangs, even if you don’t have any, this section will frame your face and complete the look. Spend a little extra time here and save it for last once the rest of your hair is set in pinned curls or hair rollers.

Show some love here, splitting the final front crown piece section into two and spending extra blow dry attention shaping round loose curls and waves.

Once all the hair is set in clips, use a volumizing hairspray for hold. Give the sprayed curls about 10 minutes to set while you do your makeup or decide on the perfect outfit to compliment this bombshell look.

Start unpinning from the nape of your neck and work your way up releasing all your curls finishing with another spritz of hairspray. Loosely tousle curls for a more relaxed look and shape around the face for your desired look.

Bombshell Blowouts for Days

To keep your hair looking Bond girl for days: avoid any water works. Stay equipped with an umbrella for rainy weather and pull on a shower cap when showering to protect your style.

Look but Don’t Touch

Admire your hair goals from afar, excessive touching can promote oil production and undo all your hard work. Day old hair can help add to volume so don’t rinse and repeat so soon. To nix oil buildup spray on a little dry shampoo on your roots.

 
This article appeared on The Right Hairstyles

Your Ultimate Guide to What All Those Ingredients on Your Shampoo Bottle Mean

Considering it’s something we use every single day (or every eight days, depending on how serious your dry shampoo habit is), it’s kind of crazy that we don’t really know what’s in the shampoo we’re pouring all over our hair. Sure, it smells good, and there’s a kind that works best for every hair texture and need, but what’s actually doing the work? We did a little investigating. Consider this your glossary to all the weird and impossible-to-pronounce words commonly found on the back of your shampoo bottle.

Sodium Lauryl Sulfate:

This molecule, which often goes by SLS, is a surfactant, a.k.a. a cleansing agent. Its most important use is to cleanse the hair and scalp—and, as a bonus, it produces that foamy lather that makes a good hair-washing seem so luxurious. However, this family of sulfates has also been the topic of controversy. “Though sulfate-based shampoos do effectively clean the hair, they can also strip the hair of essential oils as well as irritate the skin,” explains Ron Robinson, cosmetic chemist and founder of BeautyStat. Think of how a too-strong face cleanser can strip skin and thus irritate it—same thing happens with sulfates. They can be harsh enough to fade hair color, so go for a sulfate-free formula to keep your color fresh and vibrant.

Sodium Laureth Sulfate:

Nope, not a typo. While sodium laureth sulfate (SLES, for short) is in the sulfate family, it’s not the same thing as SLS. “SLES has molecular attachments that make it bigger than SLS,” explains cosmetic chemist Ni’Kita Wilson. Because of that, SLES tends to cause less scalp irritation than its smaller sibling.

Dimethicone:

This silicone-based polymer is also common in complexion products like primers, since it gives skin that velvety slip. It serves pretty much the same purpose in your shampoo. “Dimethicone both conditions the hair and makes it feel smoother even before you add conditioner,” explains Robinson.

Panthenol:

Probably one of the better-known—and more crucial—shampoo ingredients, panthenol is a form of vitamin B5. It’s basically the moisturizer of your hair care regimen, says Robinson, and is used to hydrate and condition hair.

Citric Acid:

“Citric acid is an inexpensive yet highly effective ingredient to adjust the pH of the shampoo,” says Wilson. A low pH matters for skin, but what’s the big deal with your hair? Actually, the conditioning agents in both shampoos and conditioners work better under acidic conditions—so, in a low-pH environment.

Parabens (Methylparaben, Ethylparaben, Butylparaben):

You’ve probably heard of parabens already, because, like sulfates, they’re a serious point of contention in beauty products. “Parabens are preservatives used to prevent bacteria from growing in the product,” says Wilson. And while that sounds like a good thing—because who wants moldy shampoo?—parabens aren’t exactly innocent. “Certain forms have been shown to have the estrogen-like effects,” explains Wilson. This is definitely an issue, since high estrogen levels have been linked to multiple forms of cancer. However, Wilson says that it’s still much weaker than the phyto-estrogen effect of soy—so if you’re comfortable ordering edamame, you’re probably fine using parabens.

Zinc Pyrithione:

The #1 dandruff destroyer, this additive is more about your scalp than hair. Since it slows the production of skin cells, explains Wilson, it also puts a stop to flakes (which are essentially clumps of those skin cells). A few hair care brands use it in their non-dandruff formulas just to ensure scalp health, but there’s really no need for it unless you actually have flakes.

Cocamidopropyl Betaine:

This molecule, derived from crowd-favorite coconut oil, is kind of like a gentler version of SLS and SLES. “It’s a mild cleansing agent with conditioning properties,” says Wilson. The benefit is that it cleanses and softens hair, but it can still cause slight irritation.

 
This article first appeared on Glamour

Skin cancer is the most common type of cancer in the U.S. if all types are combined. Melanoma specifically is among the top 10 cancers in both men and women, totaling more than 87,000 cases this year.

The best way to catch melanoma early is to have any new moles or patches of skin discoloration checked out—but only if you know it’s there in the first place. Half of melanomas go unnoticed by the person who has it, often when abnormality is on the scalp or neck. You can’t have a dermatologist examine the strange new mole on the base of your neck or behind your ear if you don’t even know it exists. And even if you’re looking, you usually can’t see enough of the back of your head and neck to notice anything unusual.

But your hairdresser can — as long as they know what they’re looking for. And it only seems to take 5 minutes of watching a video for hair dressers to become significantly more confident and knowledgeable about finding potentially cancerous skin lesions, according to a new study published in JAMA Dermatology.

“Hairdressers have the ability to monitor a large extent of the general public’s scalp and neck, highlighting their usefulness for the detection of scalp and neck melanomas via population-based screening and dermatologic referral,” wrote Neda R. Black, MD, from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora, and her coauthors.

“Findings from this study suggest that a brief educational video can be beneficial for educating hairdressers about melanoma risk and the criteria for melanoma detection while also building on self-efficacy skills in skin lesion detection that might carry over to improved screening of those individuals at risk for melanoma,” they wrote.

This same group of researchers had previously surveyed more than 100 hair dressers from 45 hair salons to find out what they already knew about melanoma, especially regarding what to look for. The acronym ABCDE is a helpful way to remember key features of a suspicious lesion on the skin: Asymmetrical, Borders are irregular, more than one Color, a Diameter greater than 6mm and Elevated (raised bump).

“Results uncovered room for improvement in knowledge regarding signs and symptoms of melanoma,” the authors wrote, but they also learned in other research that most hair dressers want to learn more about detecting melanoma. So the researchers tested how well a 5-minute informational video might improve hair dressers’ knowledge and self-confidence in identifying suspicious skin lesions.

The authors emailed out the study link with the video to 20 Los Angeles County beauty schools and 100 participants watched the video and filled out questionnaires beforehand and afterward.

Comparison of the pre-test and post-test revealed improved knowledge on all the questions about melanoma knowledge, the authors reported. Before viewing the video, 59% of the hair dressers accurately identified suspicious lesions using the ABCDE criteria, compared to 71% of hair dressers after watching the training video.

Only one in five hair dressers (19%) said they felt “very confident” about identifying a possibly cancerous skin abnormality before watching the video, but after seeing the video, the percentage of hair dressers feeling very confident doubled to 41%.

Of course, 100 hair dressers isn’t a very large group to test a training intervention, and all of the participants volunteered for the study. These results, therefore, don’t necessarily mean that showing the video to all beauty school students is going to double detection of melanoma. In fact, it’s always possible that it could lead to false alarms and over-diagnosis, at least until researchers do more work to learn how accurately large numbers of hair dressers actually detect possible melanomas.

Another caution in this study is that 79% of the participants said they had previously gotten some training on skin cancer, pointing to what researchers need to learn from future studies.

“It will be important to know if our educational video functioned to reinforce existing knowledge or to provide new knowledge about melanoma detection, or both,” the authors wrote. They also need to find out whether hair dressers’ knowledge and skills remain strong over longer periods of time, and they need to compare knowledge improvements among hair dressers who watch the video to a different group the doesn’t view it.

But the good news is that this study lays the foundation for what might become an additional set of eyes keeping a lookout for an extremely common cancer.

“Based on our initial testing of an educational video intervention, training hairdressers in melanoma screening and referral seems to be a promising avenue for future research,” the authors concluded.
 
This article first appeared on Forbes

Hair is not immune to the aging process; just like the rest of our body, it changes as we get older. Strands very gradually get finer in diameter and are unable to grow as long as they once could. The degree of change is in large part down to the genetic hand we are dealt, but it is also reliant on hormones, diet and general health.
 
30s
20s and 30s are the most common time for women to have children, and this can impact the hair. 6 - 12 weeks after giving birth, approximately 50% of women experience a type of hair shedding known as ‘post-partum hair fall' – and this is in fact one of the most common hair concerns for women in their 30s. However, it can happen to a woman of any age who is having a baby.

While the overall thickness of the hair can drastically decrease, post-partum hair loss is temporary; the shedding should stop and growth resume as usual. Eating a healthy diet and managing stress levels can help the hair to recover as fast as possible.
 
30s/40s
Ferritin (stored iron) deficiency is also a common issue for women in their 30s and 40s – and remains common up until menses stops at menopause. Ferritin is needed by the body to produce hair cell protein and a deficiency can cause excessive daily hair shedding, as well as loss of length – particularly around the temple areas. To improve and maintain ferritin levels, try to eat red meat at least twice a week. Dietary supplements containing Iron, Vitamin C and Vitamin B12 can also be very helpful such as Philip Kingsley Tricho Complex – and are essential where ferritin levels are already below normal levels.
 
40s
Volume reduction can occur at any age, but for the majority of women it usually becomes noticeable in their 40s. It is not that woman in this age group have less hairs in number than they used to, each hair is simply slightly finer. Daily application of stimulating anti-androgenic scalp drops can help to slow down the thinning of individual strands. To immediately improve the appearance of thickness, use a thickening protein spray when styling.
 
50s
The average age of menopause is around 52. While subtle changes to the hair can and often do occur long before this, menopause speeds up these changes. As the body produces less oestrogen, and the percentage of androgens (male hormones) increase, the hair's diameter and the length to which it will grow gradually decreases. Again, daily application of stimulating anti-androgenic scalp drops can help to slow down the thinning of individual strands – and applying thickening protein sprays throughout the length of the hair can give the appearance of more body.

Finer hairs are weaker, so it is important to take extra care when styling so as not to snap strands. Choose a brush that is gentle – the best are cushioned at the base with rounded, plastic prongs.
 
60s +
Sebum (oil) secretion tends to diminish in our 60s and 70s plus and this can make the hair dry and brittle. To restore moisture, strength and elasticity, use a weekly intensive pre-shampoo conditioning treatment.

Hemoglobin levels also tend to decrease during our 60s+ and this can affect the hair. Improve hemoglobin levels by taking a daily supplement containing Iron and Vitamin C.
 
This article first appeared on ukhairdressers