How to Find Your Hairstylist & Love Your Hair Day 4 of 5 day Challenge

Hello, Tami Grgas here. Just got my hair done, not blow dried or anything, but I, I don't really like to blow dry my hair very much because blow drying can be damaging. If I'm in a hurry, I'll grab the blow dryer, but for the most part, I let it dry naturally and then I play with my hydrogen bonds with a little bit of heat and cooling, and I'm done. So yeah, it doesn't take me long at all. I'm going with a little bit of keeping a little bit of my wave today, so I've got some product in there to let it— if I wanted it really curly, I'd grab it and put it up in clips like this, but today I'm not into the really curly thing. I just want it to be wavy. So anyway, today is day 4 of my 5-day challenge on how to find your hairstylist and love your hair. This is what I want women to do, okay? I am trying to inform the public that they can do this. They can not just go sit in a stylist chair and let them do their hair, but they can interview them. That's what a consultation's about, really. It's about interviewing and getting to know each other and figuring out what can and cannot work. Oh, I just got this cute Have any of you ever tried the Senegence? Anyways, I don't care for— I've got like really, really tiny lips and I don't really care for their lipstick that stays on for a long time. It— Like I say, I've got really tiny lips. I don't like to accentuate them. I just like them to you know, be there for talking with, I guess. But this is their gloss, and I got it in— I don't even know what color this is. Got a number on it, I don't know. So anyways, I like it. I just got it yesterday, and I'm going to be playing with their mascara later, so— I don't know, it feels good on my lips and it adds a little bit of shimmer and I'm good with that. So anyways, back to what we're talking about with our hair. Okay, you are not sitting right, you need to stay up there and dry. You can see I don't have my regrowth pattern anymore, which is nice. I really do appreciate not having regrowth anymore. Hi. So Right now we're gonna talk about how to find these hairstylists. Okay? And I feel that the number one thing you really need to do is you need to figure out what your budget is for your hair. Now, whether that involves you talking to a spouse or talking to family members, or I don't know what that involves for you. For me, it involves me and my spouse having a conversation. However, I'm a hairstylist. I don't really need a budget for my hair because I share services with other hairstylists now. But when I was searching for a hairstylist, I did need a budget for my hair. I didn't get my hair colored in the salon. I just got haircuts. So I just needed— and I didn't wear my hair super short like I kind of wore it at this level, maybe a little bit shorter sometimes, and a little bit longer sometimes. But I like this level of length. I like it a little bit longer in the summer because it gets hot here in Nebraska and humid, and I like to wear a ponytail off my neck a lot in the summer. Or up in a bun, or I, you know, I change that up. But these are things you have to take into consideration with your hair. All right. If you do wear short hair, like cut above the ears and spiky and fun and that kind of stuff, then you probably need to be getting into the salon. Depending on your hair growth and your preference, I've had some people come in monthly. I've had some people come in every 2 months and I've had some people right in the middle at 6 weeks. So that's— they say 4 to 8 weeks. I mean, I know that's a broad range, but it depends on your hair. All right. So that's something you have to take into consideration. I had— because I got haircuts quarterly when I was going to the salon to get my haircut. So that was once every 3 months. So we took my, my cost of my haircuts and the tip or gratuity, whatever you want to call it. And my husband and I split that into 3 monthly savings lines in our budget for me to get my haircut every 3 months. All right. That's how we worked it. We, we do Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace. I am a free spirit with money, so look out. My husband is the nerd. Thank God I married a nerd. That's all I gotta say, guys. So that's the number one. You need to first off check haircut prices in your neighborhood, in where you live, because Nebraska is going to be very middle of the road for haircut prices, although they have gone up a lot lately, like it's— everything's gone up. So it, it's gone a little bit crazy. But call around, find out what prices are. Even just Google. You can Google what's the average hair haircut price in and put your zip code in, and it should be able to give you some kind of number to go by. All right. So you're going to do that first. You're going to find out what is the average haircut price and also find out what the span is. Okay. I'm Canadian and I maybe say the wrong words for this, but you need to know the low end and the high end of what that average is. You understand? Like you get several different— Yeah. They're, they're talking an average price amongst all of the haircut prices. So you've got high-end price, you've got low-end price, and you need to know what, what's high-end and what's low-end, and that makes the average. So it might take a little bit of investigating to figure this out. But it's in my course. I walk you through this, and we figure this out together. And then you need to decide, how far do I want to go to go to a hairstylist? I mean, if I found a hairstylist out in Lincoln, Nebraska, that's about a 45-minute drive there and a 45-minute drive home. Do I want to do that, or do I want to stay in Papillion, which is the area I'm in, or— and Papillion is, what are we, southwest of Omaha? I believe I got that right. Anyways, so if you want to stay in your city or whatever you're— wherever you're living, then you need to look at, am I looking at additional cost to get where I'm going. So that might be part of your budgeting process too, if you're wanting to travel further distance. Then you're going to go online and you're going to find out about different hair stop— hair salons in your area. Look at their reviews, look at, you know, all that kind of stuff. If you run across somebody when you're shopping and you see a haircut you like, like I say, don't be afraid to ask them, hey, where'd you get your hair done? Number 1, make sure, like, if you do love their hair, but you've got fine hair and they've got super thick hair, that's probably not your hairstylist. Just in my opinion. Okay, my cosmetology 40-plus-year experience, that's where I'm coming from. All right. And that's, you're gonna, you're gonna funnel in on places to look at. And if I were you, I'd spend maybe half an hour investigating and pick your top 5. Okay. Alright. If you're Googling, just pick your top 5, not the top 5 that come up on Google, because sometimes some of them are buried, and you do have to get in there and look at their prices once you've figured out what your monthly, weekly, yearly budget is for doing hair. Alright. Also, if you do get colors done in the salon, there is if you get like a full head color, let's say you're going from dark to blonde or you're covering unpigmented hairs, that's the curly ones. Okay. That's my loving term for them. Then you're going to look at probably getting your hair done between every 6 to 8 weeks usually. And I have some customers that come in every 6 weeks and they get a color one time and then the next time they get a color and a haircut because they have longer hair and it's okay to let it go, you know, but they need the regrowth retouched. Keep calling it roots, but the roots are actually inside the head, so it's actually regrowth. Oh yeah. Yeah, it's kinda like me calling it bleach. I, I'm, I'm having issues with switching from calling it bleach all the time to calling it lightener. That's the nicer term, but pretty much it means the same thing. So once you find 5 places you want to look at Then you're gonna dive in even deeper, and you're going to look at the, the feedback that they're getting. You're gonna look at if they have any haircut pictures that they've done. You're gonna look at the different stylists at that place. And nowadays there's a lot of salon suite hairstylists. Now, generally, Someone who's working in a salon suite has had experience in a bigger salon and through that built their clientele so that they could afford to be in a salon suite. And so they, they have more experience generally. It's not always the case, but it's the general case that that I see in the salon suite world. But right now I'm seeing salon suites opening up all over the place. So I don't know if that's gonna be such the case as it has been. That's something that you might wanna look at when you're looking at these stylists. If you have a lower-end budget, you're not gonna be looking for the most experienced stylists. Yeah. Because they're gonna have a little bit of a higher-end budget. Once in a while you can find an experienced stylist who's on the lower end of the budget line, but they're rare. And I'm one of them. I just, I don't like charging some of the prices that they're charging nowadays. Mm-hmm. I keep a lot of my prices in the 1980s. So, but that's just how I prefer to do it. I'm in my home. I'm not in a full salon or a suite or anything like that. It's, I have a studio out of my home. So in that case, it's a, I think it's a little bit more inconvenient for people. Mm-hmm. Although it's a little more intimate. But I just try to keep my prices lower. I find that a lot of these salons have increased their prices because other people have increased their prices. And they will say, "Oh, the cost of the products for the salon have gone up so much." And you know what? They really haven't. They've gone up a little bit. I mean, back in the 1980s, I could buy a perm solution for $5. Now it's just under $10. In that many years, I don't think that's extreme. It shouldn't be making perms $200. Same with hair color. A tube of hair color used to run around $5. And I— these are like trade secrets I'm giving away here. So I thankfully, I didn't sign anything that said I wouldn't share this information. So right now, for me to buy a tube of color is around $9, as opposed to $5 in the 1980s. Well, it's now the 19— or the 2020s. So That was a long time ago. And it did stay around that $5 price for a long time. And then it slowly increased. It's not like it— bang! All of a sudden is more expensive. It has slowly increased in price until it is where it is today. So when I hear salons out there saying to their customers that, well, I have to increase my prices because of the cost of the goods, the, my back bar stuff. I disagree. The thing that has increased in price more than all of the chemical components, of course, there's the Brazilian Blowout, those things that, that product is expensive and that service does take a lot of time. It's, it's more about the time doing the service that dictates that price. However, I don't think anything else has increased in price as much as they are reporting it to. And the one thing that I see a drastic increase in price is the retail products. Shampoos, conditioners, styling products, blow dryers, all those things that they sell in the retail line. Back in, so like I worked at Regis, okay? And of course Regis had their own brand and they had other brands in the salon as well. And their own brand products, to buy it off the shelf, they had a shampoo that was like $8. So generally in the salon, what they buy that shampoo for, when they go to sell it in retail, that price is doubled. That's just the way it is. Mm-hmm. Most people, that's how it works. So if you nowadays, a shampoo is costing like between $20 and $30 generally for a shampoo, and that's because it's costing them half of that in the supply house. And the supply house, I don't know how much they're getting it for, but they have to be making money too. They have to keep their the roof over their hoods, their hoods, their heads. So yeah, it's, you know, the money game, the money game. So now, once you've determined the places you want to look, what I'd usually do when I was looking is I love— I'm very frugal by nature. I just am. I've been raised that way. I shop at the thrift shops looking for stuff. I became a crazy coupon lady in upstate New York when my husband was laid off and got groceries mostly with coupons. And it's just kind of become a part of me. Like, it really is. So when I see— Hi. I've heard some people talk in negative ways about this, but I disagree. I really do. So I will look at these salons. This is the way you do it though. You don't go— I'm gonna say it— you don't go to Groupon and look for a stylist. You look for a stylist and then see if they're— they have a Groupon. Okay. So you need to look at the stylist you want to go to, and by their pictures and their, their— if they have an introduction or anything like that on the website, look through that, see if they fit you. Alright. So if you are a stay-at-home mom with littles, and you see Mary Jo, hairstylist, she's in her 30s and single and living the dream party life. It might not be a fit. You know, like, it's not just about being a fit with your hair type. It's about being a fit with their lifestyle, personality, things to talk to, you know. Yeah. That kind of stuff. So I just had my appointment with my girlfriend Summer. I do her hair, she does my hair. And so I have an 18-year-old son and I'm quite a bit older than she is. And she has two young girls, one's in junior high and one's in elementary. But we had a lot to talk about because I had foster kids in the home in that age. Mm-hmm. And we still can— I still can converse with her about it and understand about what she's going through with these kids, with her kids, which have not been as traumatized as the children that I had. But we're able to have conversations about that. We're able to share about our life and about what's going on. And that's a big part of finding a hairstylist. Yes, you want them to be able to work with your hair, And Summer has fine, naturally wavy— well, hers is more curly than mine, but we have the same hair type. We— it just works out that way. Not that you have to find a hairstylist with your same hair type, okay? Because there are some ladies out there that have a different hair type than most of their clientele because their expertise is not their hair. Yeah. Their expertise is somebody else's hair. And a lot of times I find nowadays you cannot, if you were to ask a hairstylist, what's your area of expertise? Honestly, most of them are gonna say, oh, I love coloring and I love cutting and da da da da da. They're not gonna say, 'cause if someone were to ask me that, My answer would be, I love working with fine hair, and I love when it has like a natural wave, or especially a natural curl. It's my favorite hair to work with, but I can work with several other types of hair. But that's my favorite. That's my wheelhouse. That's my expertise. But I don't know that there's a lot out there that would share that kind of information. Is what it is. So once you go, once you've found your 5 people, look and see if there's any Groupons out there. There was another one. There's a few. Just go to Google. Google's awesome. Say, hey Google, are there any coupons available for this hairstylist or this salon or that kind of stuff? Yeah. Just change up how you're asking Google, see if you find anything. If you don't, be prepared to pay full price. If you do, then great, you've got a coupon to use. So, ah, let me see here. So you're going to find this hairstylist once you determine which hairstylist you're going to try, and basically the coupon thing, if one of them has a coupon, I'd go try them first. Why not save some money on your first try? And I would call and I would tell them. A lot of them are going to have— well, a lot of them nowadays should have scheduling online, but I think when you're a new customer to a new hairstylist that either, like, if you schedule it online, that you should call them as well and just say, hey, I just moved to the area, or whatever your deal is, I'm looking for a new hairstylist and I really want to make sure that I will get a full consultation with this hairstylist before they do my hair. That's the question you're going to ask. And you'll get either a yes or no. Most of them will say yes because that's what they're programmed to say. And if they say yes, you can say, "Great, so how long do you think the consultation will take?" Like, what— Generally for me, when I'm doing a woman's shampoo, cut, blow dry, the whole meal deal, it's scheduled for 45 minutes. If I'm doing a full consultation and that shampoo, haircut, blow dry, it's booked for an hour. So I take 15 minutes at least to do a consultation. That's what they should be doing. If they're saying that they don't need to add extra time, uh, and another thing is to make sure that you're not scheduled in between a color. or in between a perm or a relaxer or any of those kind of services, you want their full attention for that first appointment for sure. And this is something that people don't think about. And a lot of times that's what happened to me once is I got scheduled in between and she was trying to— rush everything, and I ended up leaving because I was not going to get the proper attention or the proper consultation that I needed to do that. So I was planning on doing an online consultation with somebody on this portion. of my challenge, but because of my email issues, I still have to figure that out. You know, technology is wonderful and weird and easy and hard. That's just the way it is. So I've got a bunch of paperwork that I have to go through. It's in here. Yep. This is all my paperwork to figure out. I'm going to go in and I'm going to reset all my settings on my emails and hopefully that gets some out there. I would love— oh, my phone. I would love for you to come join my group on Facebook. It is actually conveniently called How to Find Your Hairstylist and Love Your Hair. So try and find that group, and if you can request access, I am going to be building that group up more. It's a little bit inactive right now. It was a group That's had over 7,000 people in it. But it was inactive when I found it, and Facebook asked me if I would like to reactivate it, unarchive it, and manage it. And I was like, okay, I don't know if these 7,000 people are people that It, it was a group about sharing your hairstyling concerns and that kind of stuff. So it kind of hit, you know, what I was going after, and I still want people to share that kind of stuff, but it had been archived for a few months, so it kind of died out. So I've been trying to re-energize it, revamp it. I'm, I'm live streaming in there today, as well as on my profile and on YouTube. I'm using StreamYard. Love you. Love StreamYard. It's so— I've had some glitches with it, of course, getting used to the technology, but Yeah, it's— for the most part, I really do love it. So, um, I'm going to be hopefully after a while, I want to be doing live consultations in there, just talking to people, uh, doing like a Zoom together and asking them like, what do you want to do? Giving them a consultation online. Yeah. And showing them and showing everybody else what that should be like. I won't be able to touch their hair, but I can see their hair. I can discuss what their issues are. I can give them some hints, some tips, some tricks, that kind of stuff. I can't physically touch it or, or that kind of stuff, but— When you've been in the industry as long as I have, you don't need to be able to touch it all the time. It is ultimately better to be able to touch it. Like, you can see my hair as it's been drying is getting straighter. So that's something that when you're getting a consultation, you do not want them to wash your hair right away. Okay? You want them to see your hair as it is first. And then when you decide to go forward with them and you go back to the sink or they have a sink right there and you get your hair shampooed, then they're gonna see what happens to your hair when water's in there. And the water is basically reactivating the hydrogen bonds in there. Mm-hmm. And that's when they can see what natural curl pattern you have with wet hair, which can be with using— I don't think I have any clips here with me. But you— with using what we call jaw clips, I can take my hair and clip it up and just let it kind of dry like that for a while, and then let it fall, and it's gonna have more curl pattern to it. And these are things that you can do in the salon. Like, you can see their hair from when it's dry and when they've done it, and then be able to see it when it's wet and its natural state. Okay, so that's— when it's wet, that's its natural state. Yeah. As water not absorbs— what do you call that? Not dehydrates. Well, it does dehydrate it, but— oh my goodness, evaporates. There we go. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Woo! As water evaporates out of the hair, the hair structure changes because those hydrogen bonds that are in there, as it dries, they're kind of locking into a space, right? Locking into a— I showed it on the board the other day. They're locking into a new— let me show you on the board. It's gonna be easier that way. Okay. So This is gonna be the inside, not including all the layers in there of— this is straight hair. Okay. You see that? Let me move the board a little bit closer. My purse over here. So the hydrogen bonds aren't the only bonds in the hair. Okay, there's also just sulfide bonds and other stuff. The hair is made of keratin, hard keratin, and so are your nails. Okay, but your nails are a little bit harder than what your hair is. So my hydrogen bonds in the straight hair. Are going to be straight across, just holding the hair straight. Okay. When you wet the hydrogen bonds, they get broken. Not all of them like I just did, but the majority of them are broken when it's wet. Therefore, that's why you can take wet hair put it in rollers, let it dry, and it will be curly. Interesting, right? So in this kind of thing, if the, the hydrogen bonds are not straight across, they are at an angle here, um, in order to create this curl pattern. I'm not exactly sure how the angles go, but they are at an angle. So if you were to take this hair, once it's dry— here's hair with a curl pattern, okay? Once it's dry, if you were to take this hair and pull it straight and be able to look inside of it, the hydrogen bonds are going to be at angles. And there will be more of them as well. So that's kind of how that works. And when you have more hydrogen bonds, as opposed to fewer hydrogen bonds, it's going to— like, the more hydrogen bonds and the more disulfide bonds, the curlier the hair is. Mm-hmm. And then there's other factors that go along with it for your natural curl. So that, that's, you know, those are the things. Hydrogen bonds are something that we can work with, with our hair. Yeah. Without chemicals. So you can use water to break them and then have your hair set in rollers. Um, right now I broke them with water because I shampooed my color out and I'm letting it just dry in its natural state. I did put some product in, like I said. However, My curl pattern is kind of being pulled down by gravity. Alright. So as it dries, my hydrogen bonds are at a slight angle, but not very much. And then later on, once I let this dry, I like to get it like 90, 90-something percent dry, like pretty dry before I do anything with my blow dryer or anything. And one of these days I'll bring in my— I have one of those big fat blow dryer things that's like a big fat— like I can pull it straight and oh my goodness, I love that thing. It's so fun to play with. Yeah. I also have a smaller one that I like to use. I prefer using those over a regular blow dryer on my hair. Not everybody feels the same way about those. I love them. And maybe I'll have a few of those tools tomorrow for day 5 to show to you that I do use in my hair, and I can show you some— Thank you. some other things on my mannequin ladies, or my wigs. I've got wigs. Play with curl-on wigs. However, wigs are a little bit different. Okay? So I have a packaged wig over here that maybe I will show you, and this is something that I wanted to do for Halloween, but I ran out of time, and I didn't have my studio set up yet. But a lot of people don't know how to style a wig, and when you have a wig that's in a bag— let me grab it. Okay, so it's in a bag, it's covered by a net as well to keep the hair from going crazy. But— and this is— my son wanted to be Peach from Mario, and it just never happened. So we still have his dress, and we have his wig, and someday he will wear that. But I want to show you guys how to— when, when your children for Halloween or for like whatever, they want to wear a wig. I'm going to show you how to remove it from the packaging. I do have a mannequin head that I can use T-pins on to pin the wig on the mannequin head and then be able to comb it out and get it ready. And I did that, um, the blue— well, she's hidden right now, but I have a long blue wig with curls and stuff she got tangled up and oh my goodness, it took me a couple days of going through that mannequin's hair and resetting the curls and that kind of stuff. Like, it was just a lot. However, a lot of the wigs that I have are synthetic hair, so changing the curl pattern is not something you can do with synthetic hair, really. You can try with water and curl— and rollers, but if you were to use any hot tools, then the, um, hair itself, because it's synthetic, could melt. So that's something you have to take into consideration. I didn't want to spend hundreds of dollars on wigs. I wanted to spend tens of dollars on wigs, so therefore I have some wigs to play with because I love playing with hair. I'm a little bit crazy that way. But if you want to get a real human hair wig, it's going to be more expensive. And I can still help you figure out how to work with it. Because I, I had a girlfriend who had alopecia totalis. Poor girl. And she would show up at the door as a redhead one day. Then, you know, a week later, all of a sudden she's a blonde. Like, she just had fun with it. But she had insurance that got her a new wig every year. So she had a wardrobe of wigs. She could play with short hair, long hair, like— Oh, wow. She had a blast, and I used to help her with that. So, so yeah, that was kind of fun. So I think I'm gonna get off here soon. Tomorrow we're going to be discussing— where am I here? Tomorrow's— Tomorrow's day 5 of the challenge. So I'm gonna tell you more about the course that I have to offer. And if you guys have any questions, if any of you are interested in getting in my beta group with this course that I'm doing, and like I say, if you just have questions, or if you just want to get in the group and have a consultation with me, please, please, please send me an email. Okay, here it is. T-A-M-I at T-A-M-I-G-R-G-A-S dot com. So it's Tami at Tami Grgas dot com. And send me an email with the subject line being whatever you're interested in. I'd love to connect. I'd love to help you to find your hairstylist. I would like to help you to understand your hair. All those things. All those things. So yeah, I think that's all I have to share for today about finding a hairstylist, things to do. Let me know what kind of— if you've had any luck with finding anybody or— Yeah. Let me know. Let me know. I'd love to answer some questions about that. And like I say, your number one thing is to have a budget. That's key. And then you can decide where that budget's going to allow you to go. Okay. A lot of these less expensive places are— it's going to be a little more work to find someone there. However you can. I have worked at those kind of places when I'm— when I was in transitions, and at the very beginning of my hair career, the very beginning, I didn't have as much knowledge as I do or did later on. But there was this time that I was going through a divorce, and you know, met this crazy American. I was gonna be moving to America, but I needed to make money in the meantime. So I just worked at one of those type of places, and holy, I got a lot of clientele there, but it was short-lived. So that's something you have to be careful of. A lot of times you'll see girls that start at those places and do end up eventually going to a more expensive place, or opening a salon suite, or, you know, those kind of things. So yeah, any questions, any concerns, please reach out. I gave you my email, Tami at Tami Grgas dot com. Tami at Tami Grgas dot com. I hope to hear from you soon. Thank you. Bye. Bye.