Olaplex Salon Intro Kit

After over a decade of glorious extra-long healthy bleached blonde hair with no problems, my good stylist moved…. I live in a major metropolitan city with an international airport and a population of about a million people, including a sizable population of wealthy, vain, fashion-conscious ladies-who-lunch (no, I'm not one of them), which would seem like an ok situation to get bleached blonde hair at a salon in this kind of city. THIS IS HOW I WENT ABOUT FINDING NEW SALONS: 1) I searched for the most expensive salons. 2) I called those salons and asked if they did “on-the-scalp” bleach lightener (most don’t). 3) I asked the narrowed down salons if they had a problem with doing on-the-scalp bleach (many stylists “don’t believe in it”). 4) I asked those narrowed down stylists if they already had any current on-the-scalp customers with long hair (not just short hair), so I wouldn’t be the only one, to guarantee they have actual experience. (the ones who said yes to this I found out later lied) 5) I asked those narrowed down salons if they would carefully bleach just the re-growth and not get it all over my head. THIS IS HOW I TREATED MY HAIR STYLISTS: 1) I was respectful, professional, friendly, cheerful 2) Tipped them 25% on top of their extra high prices 3) I was easy to work with and flexible for scheduling and during salon visits THIS IS HOW THOSE NARROWED-DOWN, CREAM-OF-THE-CROP, MASTER EXPERT HAIR STYLISTS TREATED ME IN RETURN: 1) Used a permanent hair color instead of demi toner on my scalp after the bleach. The permanent hair color left oozing, bloody puss sores on my head every single time, that scabbed up, and it also fried my hair like thin brittle straw. The hair stylist never cared or tried to use something else! I have permanent follicle damage in one small area because of it. These problems stopped immediately when a new salon used demi colors instead, after the bleach. 2) Passed off the bowl of bleach without any instructions to an elderly shampoo tech, in a room without mirrors, who put 3 bowls of bleach on my whole head down to my shoulders, instead of just on the ½ inch of roots I requested. When I finally saw it & started crying, the owner yelled at me for crying in front of her customers, & said “No” to my frantic request to wash it off quickly. 3) Slap the bleach all over my head really rough and sloppy like 6th grade boys playing with finger paint. 4) When hairs were in the way of one stylist’s fingers during sectioning, she kept continuously ripping them out of my head (if the follicle gets ripped out, that hair will never come back). 5) Completely saturated the perimeter of my head including the delicate front hairs & bangs and the back underneath hairs, due to laziness, instead of sectioning them like the rest of the head is sectioned. This burnt off my perimeter including bangs down to the skin, & bleach kept getting inside the follicle, & burnt them from the inside. I thought those follicles were dead, but after I had discontinued that salon, and after 4 months of African hair scalp potions and eating extra rich food and vitamins, those hairs finally sprouted back, and for a while I looked like a Dr. Suess creature with funny short rug of hair poofing up all around the outside ring of my head. 6) Used highlight-only, “Off-the-scalp” powder bleach on my scalp (I checked the label) that said “Do not use on scalp”, which caused scalp burning and made me cry and thinned my hair out like an old woman. I told them and asked them not to use it. After I begged, they stopped using it for one visit, but at the next visit, they callously forgot, or snuck it back on to see if I’d notice. 7) Used the most generic cheapest harshest bleach of their product line, to save a buck, even though they knew their salon product line also makes a good bleach that doesn’t hurt or damage (2 or 3 Goldwell salons did this to me). 8) After I requested only 20 volume bleach on my head & said it always worked just fine, they told me instead they wanted to use 30 volume bleach, which also kept thinning my hair out to about half the volume. Three salons in a row did this to me. One even snuck 40 volume on the top of my scalp. That area turned clear like saran wrap after several minutes, and fell apart shortly after the visit like a mullet on the very top of my head. One reason they do this is to squeeze in more appointments & make more $$$$, even though they know it fries hair more. Also I checked the labels of those brands of bleach later, and they all said something like “Only 20 volume or less on the scalp”. 9) Put bleach on my scalp then put me under the heat dryer, also to speed up the appointment, even though I told them I didn’t need it. I checked the labels of both of those salons’ bleach that they told me they used on me. Both product’s labels said “DO NOT USE HEAT”. Greedy evil witches. It burned off the back crown of my hair down to the scalp, so I looked like bozo the clown with long hair on the outside and short hair in the middle. Then one of those silly goofs chided me for not getting highlights instead. The nerve. 10) Tell me that the ~bleach label instructions do not apply to them~, since they have special experience, so the extra strong bleach won’t cause harm if they put it on. Yes, it still gave me a chemical burn with blisters and burned off hair just the same. The bleach doesn’t know or care who applies it. And come to find out, many stylists try to use extra strong bleach on purpose even when it is not needed, so they can brag about it to other stylists. It’s some kind of competitive status symbol inside the industry, especially for hair stylists who have career development angst. And stylists with low self-esteem are more likely to try to use extra strong bleach, because the powerful bleach makes them feel powerful. • (If any readers ever wondered why nothing bad happened when you bleach your hair at home, but it breaks off after a salon job; or if you wonder why the bleach takes a long time at home, but it doesn’t take long in the salon – That is exactly how you can tell that they scammed you and snuck the extra strong bleach on your head to hurry you up, even though they know it ruins hair). 11) Use their standard generic cheap shampoo at the bowl that they use for everyone, instead of special pH balancing shampoo for bleached hair. So I left the salon with unbalanced pH hair that felt like sticky weak straw. Even I use pH balancing shampoo from Sally’s when I bleach my own hair. DUH! And they towel-dry it really rough back & forth, where I can feel the towel scraping my delicate freshly bleached hair. I never do this at home. I only gently blot it dry. It’s like they are little children or something. 12) Take the bleach off too early because they need me out of the salon, so that my roots aren’t all the way bleached; they are light orange instead. Then they say “In beauty school in color theory class we saw on the color wheel that orange and ash are on the opposite side, so they can cancel each other out! So if I put ash blonde hair on top of your orange roots – it will be light blonde!” (Maybe that’s why it’s called color THEORY class, because it’s just a theory.) But no! That has never –ever - worked on my hair. It just looks like one ugly color of mud on top of another ugly color mud, and it always made me depressed leaving with dingy dark greenish orange hair. The last time this happened I finally stood my ground and explained that the bleach was not on long enough, and no, I do not want ash blonde or any blonde on my orange roots. The bleach needs to be re-applied, then we need to make a note of how long it actually takes. When they did that, I finally had pretty and normal looking blonde roots, and they learned a valuable lesson. 13) HUMOROUS BUT NOT HARMFUL: It seems a lot of hair stylists who booked an appointment with me, did so under the impression that they would be able to bait and switch me when I got there, into foil weave highlights instead. Different people have different tastes, and not every single person wants foil weave highlights. To certain long-term, die-hard, bleach blonde fans, foil weave highlights are considered boring, ugly, sad, wanna-be blonde. This is the script salons always give me: (Do beauty schools give this script to their students?) – “You don’t want MONOTONE color. Nobody does that any more. It’s old-fashioned. Don’t you want MULTI-DIMENSIONAL COLOR with TONE & DEPTH?” As soon as I start hearing this recorded spiel, I always start laughing. When I say NO ten times, they act really confused, like they thought they would pressure me into changing my mind, and hadn’t planned on this. The only hair stylists who didn’t try to do this were men, who seem to enjoy making and looking at platinum blonde hair (see below). 14) NOTE ABOUT WOMEN VS. MEN: Strangely, the only couple people in my history who did a careful job with applying bleach and not using too strong of bleach or heat were MEN. And a lot of men love looking at women with long platinum blonde hair. When women burned my hair off, mysteriously they never seemed sorry, and a couple sort of smirked and seemed almost happy. I hate to say it, but I don’t think some women hair stylists enjoy making other women look beautiful, and long platinum blonde fairy-tale hair is beautiful. The only exception with me was a very nice woman hair stylist who also had on-the-scalp bleached hair on her own head, so she probably understood the concern and frustrations (but her salon shut down so I couldn’t go there). So if you HAVE to go to a salon, try to go to a man, or a woman with completely bleached blonde hair on the scalp, but no one else. Hair stylists just cannot understand bleached blonde hair just by reading 2 pages in their textbook, which I found out is all that is included about bleach (Yes, I checked their textbook). Please think twice before you tear out a picture of Gwen Stefani from Us magazine and walk into your local salon and hand it to them with that request. The situation is more complicated than that, and sometimes you are just as likely or more likely to get your hair burned off in a professional hair salon. ******** I didn’t just get a random bad apple of a hair stylist. There are consistent, deep industry-wide problems in the entire salon business. Now I have a traumatic fear of salons, and the only person allowed to ever bleach my hair is ME. I use gentle, high-quality JOICO CRÈME LIGHTENER which does not hurt or burn at all, with my favorite brand of cream developer (1:2 ratio), and OLAPLEX. I have bought OLAPLEX from this buyer, and from other buyers on Amazon and eBay. I have never gotten a fake OLAPLEX from anyone so far. These hair products, which I apply neatly and carefully according to the package directions, are helping my new hair grow in healthy and beautiful again like it used to be. :) Who would have thought that bad things are less likely to happen when you follow directions?! You can see the exact cut-off line on my hair from the very month where I started using these products myself at home and stopped going to salons. It’s amazing. My new blonde hair feels as thick & healthy as my normal unprocessed hair since using OLAPLEX and this good JOICO bleach, and my hair doesn’t disintegrate after several months like all of my recent salon-blonde hair did. Since I have been bleaching my roots at home, nothing bad has ever happened! It’s like night & day compared to the constant nightmares that happened to my hair at salons. After I am done bleaching, I go through my hair and look for any left-over spots or rings and bleach just those areas with weaker 10 volume bleach mix. That’s all you have to do, to not over bleach and burn your whole head off for no reason. I use a “TAYMOR ADJUSTABLE FLOOR MIRROR” to see the back of my head, where I also do neat, skinny, pretty rows without overlapping. I apply bleach on my head neater than any salon I have been to in my life, and that’s the truth. Then I use a high-quality professional demi-permanent toner. My resulting hair color is pale soft natural blonde with no orange in it. Don’t anybody dare complain to me about “not giving salons ‘professionals’ a chance.” I have obviously given them like 10 chances, more than any sane person should do, and I tried very hard for them to work. That’s their problem if most of them have no: concept of customer retention and long-term business plans instead of just a few immediate short term profits, respect for hazardous chemicals, customer service & human interaction skills, or ability to read & follow directions.