Deep Conditioners

Is your hair feeling and looking a little “blah” lately? Feeling like it needs a pick me up? Whether it’s lifeless, frizzing out of control or lost its shine, it’s probably because your hair is lacking something crucial - mositure. From straightening to lightening, and the everyday environment, we put our hair through so much. We often compare our hair to our skin. Think about how we take care of our skin; make up remover remove, face wash, toner, serum, mask, moisturizer, and sunscreen. Now think about how you are taking care of your hair? Shampoo and condition, and maybe using a product? See this difference?

Want to know one of the best ways to restore and revive your lifeless locks?
Invest in an at home deep conditioning treatment.

How often should you be using a deep conditioner?

This is one of the most common question we get from our clients. Deep conditioners should be incorporated into your weekly routine. They are not meant to be used only when your hair is past the point of no return. Just like with face masks, the more you use them, the more your hair will improve over time.

What’s the Difference Between a Hair Mask and a Deep-Conditioning Treatment?

There are endless products that are designed to restore your hair, but which is the best? The very important difference between these two similar hair care products. “Masks leave your hair feeling silky and smooth, but they are just that: a mask.” In other words, they’re only going to cover up the problem—not permanently fix it. You need a treatment to change the chemistry of your hair. Heat styling/color/climate all breaks the bonds in your hair so everyone should be using a bond-building treatment at home.

What’s the best deep conditioner for my hair?

We broke it down to our favorite deep conditioners for every hair type. Thick, fine, curly or normal, no matter your hair type, it’s important to find products tailored to your hair needs. We’ve complied some of our best deep conditioning treatments, listed by hair type/concern, so you can find the perfect treatment of your hair.

1. Normal Hair

Normal hair is still in need of a pick me up. The sun, environment and everyday styling can weaken your hair over time. It can give your hair the extra boost it needs. These two products are packed with powerful superfoods and natural ingredients
Try: Pureology Hydrate Superfood or Strength Superfood ($44.00)
The Hydrate Superfood Treatment formula leaves hair feeling hydrated and vibrant. It is made with essential nutrients such as Avocado Oil and Coconut Oil to nourish and moisturize dry hair while strengthening the surface of the hair. The Strength Cure Superfood Treatment leaves hair looking and feeling stronger. The Goji Berry Extract and Olive Oil to protect hair from environmental damage while increasing smoothness and shine. 

2. Highlighted Hair

For many of us, damage to our hair is inevitable. For my blondes, that want to always be blonder. You need to add olaplex to your weekly routine. Blowdrying, straightening, and curling day after day takes a toll on the integrity of your hair and can leave it looking and feeling lifeless. If you use heat on your hair as part of your daily routine, then you need a deep conditioning treatment.

Try: Olaplex No. 3 ($28.00)

A concentrated treatment that strengthens the hair from within, reducing breakage and improving its look and feel. It addresses damaged and compromised hair, while strengthening and protecting the hair structure. Giving the hair a healthy appearance.

3. Colored Hair

No matter if your hair is lightened, toned, or just an all over color, you'll want to incorporate a mask that can help get your hair back to its natural state (or as close to it as possible)

Try: Pureology Colour Fanatic Deep Conditioning Hair Mask
($44.00)

Give your hair the equivalent of a spa day. This deep conditioner has 21 benefits, penetrating strands to instantly restore, protect and strengthen. Adding shine, helping maintain beautiful color, all while helping nourishing hair.

4. Frizy Hair

Do you feel like your hair keeps getting fuller and frizzier no matter what you try? A deep conditioner can help tame your frizz and give you silky, smooth hair - especially ones made specifically for your hair type.

Try: Phyto Lisse Smoothing Mask ($45.00)

This ultra-smoothing mask made to tame and silken the most unmanageable hair with up to 72 hours of frizz control. This smoothing mask conditions, smooths, and strengthens, leaving strands extremely soft, supple, and totally under control, rain or shine.

 5. Coarse Dry Hair

Is your hair hard to manage? Good news, you’re not alone. Coarse hair is difficult but with the right products, you can begin to tame your hair. One secret is to clip it up, and put a bag around your hair to trap in the heat so it can take the deep conditioner to the next level.

Try: Loreal Prober Recreate ($45.00)

A restorative hair masque that works to smoothen and hydrate damaged hair from root to tip. A professionally formulated hair masque for damaged hair, leaving it stronger with long lasting protection against damage. 

6. Fine Hair

“I don’t want to weigh my hair down” those words are what we hear the most from our clients with finer hair. It’s still important to add this into your routine to strengthen ends, tame frizz and restore the natural shine. Just make sure to keep it off your roots to keep it from weighing down.

Try: Phytojoba Brillance Mask ($45.00)

A deeply hydrating, shine-enhancing mask that weightlessly restores softness and luster to dry hair. This indulgent conditioning mask enriched with jojoba oil melts into hair to moisturize intensely and detangle weightlessly.

Vision Board

I absolutely love this time of year. I love getting the opportunity to sit and reflect. Maybe its the dreamer, or the business woman in me, but planning out the new year is one of my favorite things to do! So much so, Berni and I, take a week off every January to plan for the upcoming year. We look at what we accomplished last year, what we want to accomplish this year, and what could we have done better. Our favorite question to ask is “What will I do this year to to become the best version of myself?”

Whether you’re able to take an entire week off, a day or even just a few hours, writing down your goals is the most important thing you can do. We encourage you to schedule out sometime, to sit down and plan out your goals and dreams, and how you are going to achieve them. Make this your year! If you don’t take the time, you’ll find yourself asking yourself what happened to the year when you look back on it.

I want to help you set your goals, and help you achieve them by using a vision board. My vision boards are something I hold very dear to my heart, and fun to look back on over the years as you have grown. I believe that visualization is one of the most powerful tools used in achieving your goals. Visualization is nearly as powerful as performing the action. When you visualize yourself living in your dream home, your brain trains your body for that reality. Our brains are so incredibly powerful.

What exactly is a vision board?

A vision board is a collage of visual images or words that represent the life you want to live. They are imagines serving as your future, an idea where you are going, your goals and dreams. They are something inspirational you look at everyday. We broke it down to 9 different areas we wanted to improve in our life in order to become the best version of ourselves.

First thing first, have a clear direction and be passionate about your goals. Be honest with yourself on what you value most in your life in these different areas.

Second, we have looked at the different areas in our life. We say there’s 4 main areas of your life: personal, career, financial and spiritual. From those main 4 areas, with then broke it down into 9 subcategories.

How to make your vision board:

As you're looking at these areas in your life, start to write down what comes into mind. From there write down JUST 1 GOAL in each of these areas. What is something you really are passionate about accomplishing? We feel as if we try to set to many goals, and we become overwhelmed, and in the end, we accomplish nothing. Make sure you are very clear in each goal, if you want to drink more water, how much water? The more in depth your goals are the more realistic they become.

Think about this; if your accomplish that 1 goal that is most important to you in each of these areas. And you were intentional, mindful and purposeful with each goal and you actually accomplished them, think about how your life would be different. You would’ve had a great year!

1. Poster board, magazines and glue! (We’ve done this way for years, but this year we went digital!)

2. Canva - digital, and whats nice about digital is you can print off multiple copies for your home!

How to do it digitally:

Super Easy and the best news is its FREE! www.canva.com Make an account, and then click create a design in the upper left hand corner. Up will pop what kind of design would you like to make. Scroll all the way down to the bottom and click “custom design” type in 3300 x 2550 and it’ll make it the size of a landscape paper. In the black tool bar on the left, go down to downloads. I got my images off google and just saved them to my computer. You can add texts and create whatever look you want too! One tip we recommend is to keep it clean and neat! From there hit the download button in the top right and save it! Print off copies and keep one on your phone too!

The Action List

Alright, now you have created a beautiful vision board! Now what? Lets talk about breaking it down to make these goals achievable with “The Action List”. The hard part is make your dreams become reality. This is where the action comes into play at:

1. Who: Holds you accountable
2. What: Is making your goals happen
3. Where: Direction your headed, daily, weekly, monthly

After you have your goals set, we have to break them down into smaller, more manageable goals. For example, my financial goal is to save $10,000. If I want to save that in a year, I need to figure out how much I need to save weekly and monthly. So I took $10,000 dived by 12, and that got me $833 monthly, and then took $833 and divided that by 4, and that ended up $233 weekly. So i know every week, I need to save $233. Another example is, reading 18 books. That number seems like a lot of books, but thats 1.5 books a month. And I can achieve that by just reading 10 pages a day! Pretty incredible at how big and scary a goal looks, but when broken down how achieve it can be!

Jacque’s 2019 Vision Board

1. Save $10,000 - $833 monthly $208 weekly

2. Eat more fruits and vegetables + work out 5 times a week

3. 10 minutes of quiet time every morning

4. Starting a podcast

5. Attend a balayge class

6. Read 18 books - 1.5 monthly

7. Travel to greece for our honeymoon

8. Raise $50,000 at the Purse Auction + 10 people to donate $1,000

9. Be intentional with scheduling time with family and friends

Berni’s 2019 Vision Board

1. Save $1,000 monthly ($12,000 for the year)

2. Drink more water, drink 70z of water daily

3. 15 minutes of quiet time + journaling every morning

4. Teach 10 business Classes

5. Attend a Extension Class

6. Listen to 1 TED Talk weekly

7. Go to NYC!

8. Raise $50,000 for NLB

9. Take dance lessons with my hubsand

How would your life be different if next year on December 31, 2019, you looked back at your year and you accomplished your goals you set? Think about that! We would LOVE to see your vision boards! Share with us on social media and tag us in them, or drop a comment with your boards! Make sure to share this post with your friends and loved ones if your found this post helpful. We can’t wait to see how this year goes!

It's not a bandaid

I was talking with a client in my chair about how I was taking a break from social media for a little bit. She is my age and has been a friend on mine for a long time. She asked me the question I got asked a lot, “why?” I began to explain, I felt overwhelmed, just needed have more time to think for myself without being influenced by others. For the past year, Berni and myself have felt a tug at our hearts to educate more in our industry. And I needed to have a clear mind to listen to what direction we may want to go. (Yes, don't worry we’re still going to do hair) I felt like no matter how much I did in a day it wasn't enough. Which is such a weird and terrible feeling. I remember wesley coming home, and asking me, what did i do today. And i would say, i didn't really do that much today. I did xyz, and somedays it would be 5 really hard task, some days it would be almost 20 things from small to big. And he would say babe that is a lot!

As me and my client talked about it, she said something I thought was interested. I know she had every intention of it helping me, she said, this is a bandaid. When you go back on its not going to fix anything. Which is true to a point. But sometimes, we don't know what someone else is walking through and exactly how their feeling. I didn't feel like it was a bandaid, I felt as if it was part of the problem. I lost motivation, I was having a harder time doing my daily things. I needed to hit a refresh and a pause button. (click here to read what I learned from my break on social media)

I was following people that were motivating me, encouraging their followers to add certain practices into the daily routines, all things that were good. I would tell people all the time, you need to go follow her she's so motivating! I would wake up in the morning excited to watch what she had to say. Until, I felt anxious all the time. On my days off from work, I would feel that I needed to be doing more, and more and more. On my days at work, I wouldn't feel like I did as much as I could have on working on my education dreams. So much so, that it started to effect my body. It effected my mood, I was easy to irritate, I was exhausted, I didn't look forward to going into work, I couldn't add one more thing on to my plate. My body was taking a toll. My eye began to twitch and then progressed to my nose. It twitched for months, and kept getting worse and worse before I went to the doctors. The morning I went to the doctor, it twitched for 5 straight hours before I went in. And she told me, stress causes this.

I thought to myself, stress? I am not stressed. I don't even know what stress feels like, but I don't really feel much different than I normally do. I wasn't convinced. Well it just so happened, the next day I was heading to the beach for a long weekend. And you know what completely stopped after 1 day away, my twitching.

I will be the first to tell you, its not just a bandaid. You are the one who knows yourself the best, you are the one who needs to take a step back sometimes and know that is okay! We cant do it all. I am seeing anywhere between 80-100 clients a week, training 4 hairdressers, teaching classes, doing payroll, sending schedules, ordering inventory, planning a wedding, a honeymoon, trying to run 3 social media pages, spend time with my fiancé, family and friends, and all while showing up everyday.

This has taught me, to ask for help. Let people help you where they can. I am still working on this, but I can say I am more aware now than ever. Im always thankful to walk through different seasons in life, because it gives me an understanding and heartfelt answers to help someone going through the same thing. So today, I encourage you to know everything will be okay, to take time for yourself because you are the most important person in your life. If you are not okay, you cant serve those around you the way you want too. Take a long bath, drink some water (half your body weight), do something new and exciting with your spouse or friend, go get a massage, really go schedule one right now, and ask someone to help you. Take care of yourself today physically and mentally, your body will thank you.

Social Break

What a beautiful tool social media can be. You get to connect with your friends, family but also people around the world that you may have never met. You get to be inspire by others in your career, or motivated by some you follow. But at the same time, maybe its leaving you feeling overwhelmed, anxious, that you're not doing enough or simply not enough. Sometimes, it feels like others are passing you by while you're staying stagnant. We’ve all been there right?

When I use to hear people talk about social media in a negative way, personally I couldn't relate. I never really had a “bad” experience on it. I would get on, scroll for hours a day (yes hours, check your iPhone productivity) look at inspirational quotes, pretty hair pictures, and watch insta stories. Then put it down, and continue on with whatever I was doing. Until, about a month ago, I found myself feeling down, anxious, feeling like no matter how much I did it wasn't enough. I was overwhelmed. Those words, aren't words I use to explain myself, I never really have been anxious person, I'm good at prioritizing my task, I am busy behind the chair and I am a calm, positive person.

So when I stopped long enough, to check in with myself to see what was going on. It came down to one thing, Instagram. The people I enjoyed watching their stories, the ones who were motivating myself and others, were the ones that made me feel like I'm simply not doing doing enough. So that evening, when Wesley came home he knew something wasn't right with me. Over dinner, I sat there and cried. I cried about how I was feeling, and I thought back to how long this has been building up. We talked about the pressure I was putting on myself, and how it was effecting me. So that night, I deleted Instagram and Facebook from my phone.

The next day, I woke up with a sense of peace and calmness. I did my morning routine, headed into work early (because you're more productive without it) and went on with my day. I found myself in my 2 minutes of mixing hair color or at the front desk, I would grab my phone, swipe to open Instagram and go to the app that took its place. I did this multiple times that day without even thinking about it. Instagram became a habit I didn't even know I had. Since deleting it, I have logged in from my laptop or my phone browser, occasionally. But I have to intentionally want to log in. Now when I do scroll, I don't stay on but for 5 to 10 minutes at the max.

These are the five things I have learned since deleting Instagram from my phone:

1. Life goes on

Just because I deleted social media, that doesn't mean the world stopped. As funny as that is to say, it’s the truth. People will keep posting and sharing, liking photos, following people. My world didn't come to an end, it actually became better. Whenever you do something new, you are fearful. I was raised in the generation on social media. When myspace first came out, I would fight my brother over who was going to get on first when we got home from school. Then came facebook, twitter, instagram, snapchat, ect. Since my first iphone, I have had the apps, I have had these tools at the tip of my fingertips for almost 15 years (crazy huh?)

2. No one will notice

You know how many people have noticed I haven't been on? NO. ONE. When i have mentioned it to my friends and close ones, they haven't even noticed. The only people that will notice is yourself, and your ones you spend the most time with.

3. More productive and free time

My phone usage went from 3-4 hours a day on my phone, to 30 minutes. It dropped that drastically. And I was always the one that said I'm not on my phone to much. I had more time in the mornings, more time to be a better leader at work, time to work on projects at home. I had more time with Wesley, or to call someone when I was thinking of them.

4. Less anxious

Comparison is something we all struggle with. I am in the beauty industry, with a lot of extremely talented people. The first time i have ever been “bullied” on instagram was when we let one of our employees go. The words she chose to share about myself as a stylist really effected me. It shook me to the core. It hit me deep done into my bones, unfortunately i let them effect me. As much as i tried not too, those words hurt badly. It made me believe that I wasn't good enough as a hairdresser, and it was the first time I believed that about myself after being in the industry for 9 years. That was the first time that i saw social media as bad. Its easy to compare ourself with others. But you don't know the story behind what is going on with them. Or how hard they worked for what they have now. And sometimes we have to ask ourself, would we even want that? Most of the time, the answer is no.

5. More present

Being present, is one of the hardest things but most important tools in life. Its so easy when someone is talking to you, to be scrolling through instagram. And you could be half listening to them but also reading someones caption. It made me realize how many times we are on our phone around our loved ones. So this has been a nice reminder to put the phone down, and be with the people right in front of you.

Even if this inspires you to take a day a week of social media, or not be on it when you're around your family and friends. Our brains need a few minutes just to think nothing, instead of going a million miles a minute. Even if you decide to not get on it until a certain time, I have a feeling you will see a difference in the way you feel.