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Do you ever hear anyone say they’re having a bad face day? Or a bad lip day? Or a bad eye day? No, there is only one expression: a bad hair day. That is how important hair is to a woman’s life.

When it comes to home remedies and store-bought products vs. salon treatment, they’re exactly the same. The difference is, when you do it at home — this is very scientific — you call it ‘active touching’. You're actively touching yourself. In the salon, it’s called ‘passive touching’, for someone else is touching you. Scientifically, the reactions have to do with different nervous mechanisms. It’s very complicated and our understanding is not that deep, but the act of touching yourself and the act of someone else touching you involve different mechanisms. When you’re touching yourself, all the responses in your body will react back to your own hand. That’s why it feels so good when you get your hair washed at the salon!

When you go to the salon, they will take care of you thoroughly. Like when you wash your hair yourself, how much time do you spend? You don’t clean it out completely. When you go to a salon that’s what you’re paying for. When people are touching you, when people are massaging you (passive touch), you’re actually happier because you don’t have all these responses like, ‘How bad is my scalp?’

Damaged hair can be fixed. You need a lot of treatment with heat. Repeated treatment. Your hair is coated with keratin. Keratin is like a scale, and it blows out and breaks. It’s supposed to be a long thread, and when it breaks you get damaged hair. To fix them, you need a chemical reaction. You need chemicals and heat. Heat makes things faster. When you want to bind these threads back together again, you need heat, like what’s used in a rebonding. The heat makes it look sleeker because you’re actually arranging the molecules! At home, without heat, you’d have to wear a hair mask almost a whole day. But if you’re using a specific product and the product says leave in for five minutes, then follow what it says. It depends on the brand. The big brands have tested it. A little bit longer doesn’t hurt.

Shampoos that advertise for dry scalp work too, but for hair growth you need to massage and take vitamins — shampoo alone won’t work. Dandruff is a medical condition where your scalp peels off, but there is another kind of dandruff that happens when you don’t wash your head clean and gunk builds up. This is from deposits of your shampoo that are still stuck, that you didn’t wash out. If you want to know if you have actual dandruff or not, use a clarifying shampoo for four days; it will rip everything off and clean everything. It’s like after you have a flood. If you want to clean the floor, you need to get rid of the dirt. The anti-dandruff shampoo works. They do tests. It costs around THB 5 million to 7 million a test, minimum. That’s why I say the big companies can do it, but the small companies cannot. It’s so expensive, the smaller companies will always use old technology. Those big brands will be the only ones who can afford the testing, and that’s why local products don’t work; they can’t afford it.

In the case of hair repair, home remedies do actually work. Avocado, beer, egg treatments — they work. But it’s messy! The thing about it is, you have to use 12 eggs, beat them down in a bowl and try to put the mixture on your hair and then wrap up. But when you have something in a tube, you just put it on and be done! Tah dah! That’s the point of these products: to make home remedies easier.

Products don’t do all the work for you, though. As an example, avocado has very good oil. If you use avocados yourself, you’re guaranteed to get the avocado oil from it, but if you use a product, you have to look how much is in there. By law, product makers only have to include .01% to claim avocado oil as an ingredient. Most of the big expensive brands use only that small percentage. Again, however, products provide major advantages. You will get close to the same results if you use avocado at home, but a product is less messy and contains other specific ingredients to target the problem. If it’s a big brand, it will do what it’s supposed to do because it’s the law.

Every woman has a problem with her hair, particularly split ends. Moroccan oil is the cure for that. Put it on every time you wash your hair. You need to apply it section by section; the process can’t be rushed. One thing is when you go to a salon, you forget to look at what they’re doing. When they put things in your hair they rub it really fast in between their hands first. This makes things spread out so there is no glob in your hand when you apply it. Every salon does this. That’s a trick! You need to spread it through the whole hand. It’s a technique they teach in salon school. Apply it form the root down, but don’t actually touch the root if you don’t want oily hair! It’s hard to get the back of your hair though; that’s why you go to the salon so they can do it for you!

When you go to the salon it’s not about the product, it’s about the service and the expertise. Remember, the salon sees a lot of hair. They know that if hair feels a certain way then they need to use a certain product. You have 1/100^th of their experience of touching hair. The salon cleans your hair much more thoroughly and the massage is nice — you can’t get that at home! They can recommend a product that’s actually good for your hair type. They’re like a doctor because, as mentioned, they see all types of hair. You’ve only seen yours and maybe your mother’s and your sister’s.

There is no such thing as one single ingredient that needs to be in a product to ensure great hair. It takes many ingredients to make the chemical reaction, and fixing hair is all about chemical reactions! You can’t look for one main ingredient.

For real healthy hair, what you need is to eat well, sleep well and lower stress!