Avoid Holiday Disaster: Don’t Color Your Own Hair

Fashion / Original Style / pop culture

Avoid Holiday Disaster: Don’t Color Your Own Hair

November 19, 2016

charles i. letbetter - don't use box color

Want to do something to your hair for the holidays? Put down that box color! Don’t be a DIY disaster.

Erg. The holidays are here and your hair is just an absolute mess. You want to do something with it, but you let the season sneak up on you. If you didn’t schedule an appointment with your stylist at least a month ago, you’re screwed on trying to get in to any reputable salon. So, for a lot of women, there’s this incredible temptation to just do something yourself. After all, you can get boxed hair color cheaply enough at your local store. Sounds like a reasonable work-around, doesn’t it?

I get it. When I first met Kat, one of the things I liked was that she was very adventurous with her hair color. The problem was that in doing her hair herself she was routinely frying her hair, having to chop it all off and then growing it out again. That routine, along with a few other details, is what encouraged her to go to beauty school. Want to guess what she learned there? You shouldn’t be using box color on your hair! Mind you, she’s still every bit as adventurous with her hair color, but she’s learned her lesson and no longer has to cut off all her hair every few months.

Still, there are sources out there who are trying to sell product and go to some lengths to do so. Clairol paid for an article on Popsugar touting the ease of using their box color to liven up one’s hair. They did their best to make it look like something objective, though the editors at Popsugar were very clear in making sure readers understood it was a sponsored article. What they apparently weren’t expecting was the fact that a number of actual licensed, professional stylists would not only read the article, but share the article as an example of what not to do. Kat showed me some of the comments. They’re rather brutal and for good reason:

NEVER USE BOX COLOR ON YOUR HAIR!

A Thousand Different Shades Of Wrong

Part of the appeal for using box color is that it is, allegedly, easy to find a color that you’ll like, maybe even one that matches your natural color. If only that were true. While boxed products do offer a wide variety of colors that look on the outside of the box as though they might be what you want, the reality is much, much different. First of all, there’s no such thing as one-size-fits-all hair color, and that’s exactly what boxed color is trying to pull off. Trying a hair color isn’t like trying on a rain poncho. Hair color has to be individually formulated to your hair for it to work correctly. Boxed color can’t do that.

Do you have any idea everything your colorist considers before putting something on your hair? You know they ask a lot of questions and they keep meticulous records of what they’ve done previously for good reason. Anything that touches your hair has the potential to change the way it takes color. Your colorist considers things such as your hair’s porosity, your skin tone, the natural level of pigment, previous chemicals used on your hair, the kind of shampoo you use, and whether you have any grey. Even then, colorists know that the ash blonde that looks wonderful on one person is likely to look like a fruit basket gone wrong on someone else.

Boxed colors also use a 12% or higher developer, significantly higher than what your colorist is likely to use. The reason boxes use such a high level is to make sure that the product does something to your hair. Unfortunately, that something is more likely to be in the neighborhood of frying it rather than helping to any degree. There’s just no way that a boxed hair color product can give you the same level of individualized attention that your hair needs.

Not as affordable as you think

Another reason many women choose boxed color is because it appears to be more affordable. $8 for a boxed color versus $60 or more for just a single color at a salon? Sure, sounds like a wonderful bargain—until it all goes wrong. Anyone who has used box color likely knows the pain of looking in the mirror and seeing something they did not expect. What do you do? Try another color? Attempt to wash it out as quickly as possible? Put another color over the top of it? All of those options are horrible for your hair and end up leaving it looking worse than when you started.

One of the things we need to understand when talking about box color and that their formulas change all the time and companies are under no obligation to tell the consumer what changes were made and how they might potentially affect your hair. So even if you managed to find a boxed product that wasn’t too horrible one time, chances are extremely high that when you go back six months later and try the same color again it doesn’t work because the formula changed! Oh, and if you tried doing highlights with one of those silly cap things you almost certainly know what it’s like to have polka-dot hair. They don’t work.

There’s no substitute for a professional application and customized color. So, when you do it yourself and it fails, horribly, you end up having to go to the salon to get it fixed. At the very least, you’re now going to pay over $100 for a colorist to repair your self-induced disaster. If you have managed to fry your hair in the process then you’re going to get an unwanted hair cut removing the damage. One can easily come out of the salon a couple hundred dollars poorer and looking like a Marine Corp recruit who just entered basic training. Repairing the damage one inevitably does to their hair with a box color always costs several times more than what the salon color would have been. Doesn’t it just make more sense to have it done right in the first place?

Your options are limited

Let’s get real here: if you don’t already have an appointment with your stylist by now, your options are tremendously limited. You do not want to attempt a home box color. Neither do you want to risk a bad home perm job for many of the same reasons. While the number of options at this juncture are limited, there are a couple of things we can safely recommend.

First, consider having your hair done at a beauty school. The students need the practice and are supervised by instructors who are there to help prevent a disaster like the one you would get at home. Understand, this time of year even they may not have time to give you a complicated color process. Anything that takes multiple hours of work is probably best saved for after the holidays. However, they can do haircuts and color re-touches with little problem. Of course, we strongly recommend using an Aveda school salon if you have one in your area. Yes, we are more than a little biased. In addition to getting a great cut and style, you also get their wonderful massage service and it’s still only $17 for a haircut. Color services start somewhere around $30.

Second, if you’re really desperate and have some sense of what you’re doing, a wash and set can be done at home without necessarily ending in disaster. Understand, though, this takes some knowledge of what you want, what size curler to use, and the dexterity to actually fasten the curlers in the back of your head. Doing anything to your hair on your own is challenging, but at least if you botch this one you just wash it out and try again. I remember my mother frequently doing her own hair on a Saturday night so that it would look good for church the next day. Of course, my mother went to beauty school, too. She had an advantage. Still, if your back’s against a wall, this might be worth a shot.

I know everyone wants to look good for the holidays and with busy schedules it’s easy to forget to set appointments with your hair stylists. Still, there is no good reason for jumping off the deep end and trying to color your hair yourself with some box you picked up at CVS. Wash your hair, use a good conditioner, and chances are no one will give you any grief. After all, everyone’s more interested in the food. You’ll be fine.

Enjoy the holidays!

Current Issues / PotD / science

Science, Psychology, and Bullies

March 14, 2016

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny…’ —Isaac Asimov

Science depends on replication. Psychology depends on publication. Bullies mar both.

Creative people walk a fine line between brilliance and insanity. We know this, or at least, we think we do. Anecdotal observation tells us the premise is true even if there is no research to support the observation. Science, however, actually does confirm a link between creativity and mental illness. Maybe. That report was published in 2010, but the whole premise was later brought into question when additional studies failed to replicate the results. Arguments between researchers are ongoing, but trust me, we’re all nuts.

Science relies on research that can be duplicated. A scientific theory is just a nice idea until someone can not only prove their concept to a reasonable degree (100% certainty is often impossible), but someone else has to be able to copy that research and achieve the same results. Studies cannot be considered accurate if there is no corroboration. That’s just the way science works.

Well, that’s the way science is supposed to work.

The field of psychology has long had a PR problem and much of that problem revolves around the difficulty that exists in duplicating their research. It’s one thing when scientists are doing research on inert materials or with factors that are relatively absolute. Psychologists, however, have to do their research with humans, which means they’re working with a base set that, at its very core, cannot be duplicated exactly. Sometimes, they can’t even get close. Two different study groups in two different parts of the world may duplicate research methods exactly and still come up with wildly different results, not because the methodology was flawed, but because of basic differences in the humans studied. This makes finding necessary corroboration difficult, and significant when it happens.

So, let’s take a study done some 20 years ago. This study, which involves chocolate chip cookies and self-control, has been the basis for 83 similar studies and almost 200 additional experiments, all coming to the same general conclusion. So, one would think that this passes the scientific requirements for proven theory. Pretty much everyone in the field of psychology accepted this research as fact.

Then, last week an announcement was made that brings all that research into question. There is a paper set to publish next month that directly challenges all the findings from the past 20 years on this particular subject. Most importantly, for this conversation, it challenges how psychological research is performed and the common use of macro-analysis in assessing that research. What the paper seems to infer is that huge bodies of established psychological research are wrong because of errors in macro-analysis.

How does this affect you and me? Everything your therapist told you may be pure bunk. That doesn’t mean psychotherapy isn’t helpful; don’t go cancelling that appointment just yet. But people who rely on the accuracy of that information, which not only includes psychotherapists but aspects of law enforcement, retail planning, marketing, transportation, and everything else that relies on studies of human behaviour, now have more reason than ever to question the veracity of information being presented as fact.

While psychology is the field currently in the hot seat, you should know that questions concerning the accuracy of published research have been around for a while. A study from 2005 claims that most research findings are false. But then, an article for the American Psychological Association questioned whether there is a reproducibility crisis.

There are a crap ton of reasons these fallacies exists, but what they all ultimately come down to are money (no big surprise) and what Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert calls shameless bullies. There are millions of dollars in funding on the line, not to mention tenure, based on a researcher’s ability to publish their findings, and the greater number of scientific publications have shown a distinct bias for publishing papers that are positive and declare new findings that, at least on the surface, seem to move science forward. And while the scientific method requires that research be duplicated, there is considerable animosity between original researchers and those who would reproduce their work. Katie Palmer’s article in Wired last week, “Psychology Is In Crisis Over Whether It’s In Crisis,” had so much back and forth on the issue that my head was nearly spinning by the time I waded through everything. Folks with Ph. D.’s can be just as mean as street hoods, they merely use words that cut sharper than a switchblade.

How does one resolve an issue like this when the very methods that might solve the problems are part of the problem?

Dear science: we need you to get your act together and quickly. We’ve trusted you, put faith in your findings, confident that research that was duplicated was accurate. Now, we are beginning to question whether we know anything at all. Finding out our science is skewed is rather on par with finding out those deities we believed in probably don’t exist. Who and what are we supposed to believe? Who and what are we supposed to trust? Is anything real?

I can handle psychology being in flux for a while. After all, scientists are just as crazy as creatives. Just don’t tell me what we know about gravity is wrong; it’s Monday and I might come unglued.

Art / PotD

A Soothing, Calming Influence

November 3, 2015

chales i. letbetter - a soothing, calming influence

A Soothing,Calming Influence (2013)

What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter – a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.—Henri Matisse

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]There are connections in art defined by all things that influence us. Some influences are significant, others are more subtle, but whether we like to realize it or not, we all have some image in our mind that comes from something else we’ve seen and that image, in turn, becomes the thing that drives our creative endeavors even if they’re not within the same media.Presumably, if one had the time and resources, and could rely upon the authenticity of written testimony, all artwork, across any genre or style, could likely be connected through the artist’s shared influences.

Not everything that influences an artist, or a photographer, is art, or artistic. In the realm of full disclosure, I must admit that I am writing this morning under the heavy influence of a very good night’s sleep. I’m only half-way through my first cup of coffee and the influence of the sleep is that I’m not quite as focused and am having a little more difficulty finding the words I want. Imagine trying to get around without your eyeglasses; that’s what is influencing my writing at this moment. If I were to pick up the camera, to capture a picture of Kat lounging on the couch next to me, that same influence would pour over into my image, probably in terms of a soft focus and a higher key on the lighting.

Henri Matisse was born in a most modest home of a weaver in the very North of France, right along the Belgian border. Winters there were extremely cold and the young Matisse was rather thin and frail. His mother influenced his early vision of women, with a full bust and hips, narrow waist, slender legs and small feet. We can see that influence remaining in his work all the way through to his cut outs. She also provided influence in her work with color, mixing house paints and helping customers decide what combinations would look best in their homes.[/one_half]

[one_half padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]All his early surroundings stayed with Matisse even after he moved away from the region. The stern discipline of his father, the pigeons that roosted in the loft, the sunflowers, and the seeds were all things that would influence his painting. Then, as Henri became more serious about his study of art, his work was influenced by his teachers, William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Gustave Moreau. One can attribute Bonguereau’s training in the classics for that fact that, regardless of what other angles may be present, Matisse kept a true plumb line on all his verticals. Moreau was more progressive and pushed the young Matisse away from traditional styles.

John Peter Russell may have had the greatest art-world influence on Matisse, however, for it was Russell that introduced him to the concepts and works of Impressionism. One can see an almost immediate change in Matisse’s work. He went from dark toned still-life to brighter, more colorful settings. Not that this pleased the established art world. Matisse’s first masterpiece, The Dinner Table, was completed during this period and when first exhibited was given poor placement because of ” what they considered its radical, Impressionist aspects.”

So, the chain of influence goes on and grows long. Could we dare begin to count the number of contemporary artists, photographers, and designers who have in some way been influenced by Matisse’s work? Certainly, unapologetically, the work we are displaying here is a direct derivative of his late-period cut-outs. And, we can hope to assume, what we present here has a soothing, calming influence on someone else, who interprets in yet another fashion And so, the art moves forward.[/one_half]

Avoid Holiday Disaster: Don’t Color Your Own Hair