Biracial Hair Care Tips

Manageability is one of the key things our clients request. As you might imagine, we get a wide range of clients with many different hair types. But, making the hair easier to style, less frizzy and easier comb are common concerns among our clients.

We’d like to take a moment to review just a few products that could be beneficial in making your hair more manageable. (the model is this photo had her hair lightly blown-dry after applying Treasured Locks Curl Tamer to make it less frizzy, slightly less curly, easier to comb and smoother looking).

Treasured Locks Liquid Silk- Treasured Locks’ Liquid Silk is fantastic for redefining any texture hair. Curly hair becomes smooth and shiny. Straight or relaxed hair takes on a new sheen and smooth texture. Liquid Silk is a combination of the best science has to offer with natural botanical extracts and silk lipids to literally reconstruct hair giving it a smoother, silkier appearance. Temporary, but cumulative effect. Used when styling.

Treasured Locks Curl Tamer-Treasured Locks’ Curl Tamer is a unique styling product. Curl Tamer temporarily loosens the natural curl pattern of your hair allowing you to wear it in straighter styles. For our customers who have asked for products to temporarily tame their curly or frizzy hair, this is a great product to use on those days when you want more control. Perfect for biracial hair when you want to wear it straighter. Temporary effect. Works until hair “reverts” (usually due to humidity or washing).

Treasured Locks Thermo Shield- Treasured Locks’ Thermo Shield is a space-age protectant that prevents heat damage caused by flat irons, curling irons and hot combs. Better than old-fashioned pressing creams, Thermo Shield has silicone polymers which smooth, seal in moisture and add shine by laying the cuticles flat. Temporary effect until hair reverts.

Treasured Locks Conditioning Balm- Maximum manageability and shine with a deep treatment and strengthening finisher. Treasured Locks Conditioning Balm is a botanically rich, leave-in conditioning and styling balm that straightens and controls curly frizzy hair while, giving incredible shine and manageability. Temporary but cumulative effect.

Natural-Laxer MIX- natural herbal system conditioner applied to the hair every 4-8 weeks to make hair smoother and more manageable. Gently loosens curl pattern. Controls frizziness. Great used in conjunction with the above styling products and/or with heat to create temporary styles.

One of the most frequently asked questions we get involves straightening African-American hair. Without getting into all the socio-political and psychological reasons why someone would straighten her hair, let’s explore how this can be done. Continue reading »

There are several “ingredients to avoid” lists out there. Here are some of the ingredients we found on those lists and why they’re there. This should not be taken as a recommendation from us that you should avoid all of these ingredients. Some of the products we offer contain ingredients on the “avoid” list. Why? Frankly, there are very, very few products that do not contain at least some of these ingredients. It has been estimated that 99% of cosmetic products contain some form of paraben (a preservative). If you think that’s scary (we don’t), after looking at this list, look at your toothpaste and deodorant ingredients.

Continue reading »

What is Shea Butter?
How can I tell if something is good Shea Butter?
How should Shea Butter smell?
How do I store Shea Butter?
My Shea Butter melted. What do I do?
What color should Shea Butter be?
How can Shea Butter benefit me?
How does Shea Butter benefit my skin?
What does Shea Butter benefit my hair?
Is all Shea Butter the same?
What can I tell by looking at the label?
Where can I get good Shea Butter?
What’s the difference between raw shea butter and refined shea butter?
Do I want raw Shea Butter or refined Shea Butter?
What about East African Shea Butter?

While you may have only recently heard of Shea Butter, its use is far from a recent development. The benefits of Shea Butter have been well known for centuries. Africans have used Shea Butter for many generations to protect and rejuvenate their hair and skin. Shea Butter is not only for those of African descent though. Everyone can take advantage of Shea Butter’s benefits. Today, Shea Butter is available in pure form and as an ingredient in many products to help with maintenance of the hair and skin and relief from many common ailments.

Continue reading »

First of all, natural is a relative term. How you define “all natural” may vary from how the next person will define it. Once you mix two ingredients together, one could argue the product is not “all natural”. We believe that God put many wonderful things on this earth to take care of our bodies inside and out. Generally, speaking the less refined or manipulated a product the better. However, we also believe God gave man the ability to improve on his environment and some chemical formulations (especially medicines) are extremely beneficial. Swamp water is natural. But, I wouldn’t drink it. Aspirin is not as natural (it is an extraction of a natural compound found in willow bark), but it’s a fantastic drug. Blood pressure medications are not natural, but many of use could not live without them.

We promote products that we believe are healthy for your hair and body. All things being equal, we prefer natural products over highly refined products. Even when man tries to recreate nature by manufacturing or refining products. Time and time again, man has made “extracts” of things proven to be beneficial and research comes along later saying the supplement is not as good as the whole fresh fruits or vegetables. Often, there are delicate trace substances, a balance of substances or some other thing that we cannot quite recreate. But, sometimes the extractions are necessary. How’d you like to have to find and chew on willow bark if you had a headache?

However, all things are rarely equal. All natural products will be less stable, may not look as nice, will be more expensive and usually have shorter shelf lives than less natural products. If you like a lot of lather, you may be disappointed with all natural shampoos. If you buy all natural products, you may find they separate or go bad more easily. We have had people who thought they wanted all natural products call and complain about the products separating (an effect of not using artificial emulsifiers) or not being as thick or not lathering as well as what
they are used to. Besides just saving money, manufacturers often use chemically altered ingredients to make the products more palatable to the average consumer and more stable.

So, the decision is really up to you. Personally, we use an array of all natural products, less natural products and some completely manufactured products, depending on the product itself.

© 2004-2007 Treasured Locks, LLC All Rights Reserved. Reprint In Its Entirety. With Written Permission Only

The same basic principles apply for children as for adults. Here are the differences. Find a good children’s shampoo if your child is very young (so that it won’t burn the eyes). Children who don’t understand keeping their eyes closed to keep soap out need a tear free shampoo. However, as soon as you can, move away from these. They tend to be drying for African American hair. I recommend avoiding perms for as long as possible. Children have more sensitive skin than adults. The chemicals in the perms are more likely to damage their skin and hair. Also, children don’t usually have the patience to sit through the process of getting the perm. My stylist told me the story of a three year old girl she was trying to give a perm. Once the solution was in the hair, the child decided she was ready to leave. The stylist had to literally wrestle the child to rinse the perm out of her hair. My older daughter is almost six now and has very thick and coarse hair. Her hair is natural. I did a lot of research on the best way to care for it. I intend to leave her hair natural as long as possible. It’s really not any more difficult to care for than if she had a perm. We use Natural-Laxer MIX on her hair to make it more manageable (not straight). That and just using the basic tips above have made caring for her natural hair much easier, she has less breakage and tangles than she used to and we love the way her hair looks natural.

Q.) What’s the best hair style and/or type for black women who work out everyday? I have relaxed hair and I’m strongly considering going natural.

A.) This is a pretty complicated question. Which style is best for you is going to be dependent on your personal preferences, the texture of your natural hair and the length you have. For example, you’re not going to be able to wear certain styles until your hair reaches a certain length. If your hair has a loose curl pattern, you might be able to wear a fairly maintenance free style with some “flow”. If your hair is in a very tight curl pattern, you might have to wear a ‘fro until you get some length.

If you’re going to natural though, you probably are not going to be able to wear your hair straight (either pressed or flat-ironed). Again, this will be dependent on your hair texture. If you have a tight curl pattern, you’d have to put so much heat on it daily that you’d end up breaking it off. So, you should consider something like a ‘fro or wearing it in braids, locks or some other style that will not require heat to maintain.

What is a blog?

Well, a blog is kind of a running newsletter. We will post news, sales, etc. about Treasured Locks and you can visit a website page to read them. A blog will usually allow you to leave comments for the blogger. You can reach our blog by visiting us at http://blog.treasuredlocks.com Our blog will not take the place of our regular newsletter. But, it will be updated much, much more often and the newsletter will have links back to the blog.

A really cool thing about a blog is you can subscribe to it through a pretty new technology. This is even better than subscribing to our email newsletter because the blog is updated more often. And, you can leave comments on the blog for us and for others. But, the best thing about subscribing to our blog is you can be updated without filling up your email mailbox. You do not receive email notifications when a blog is updated. You use something called a NewsReader that gives you a notice when there is a new post made to a website that you are interested in. You then visit the site and read the news.

How to subscribe to a blog
Subscribing to a blog, if you’re not familiar with newsreaders is a little tricky. Hopefully, it is going to get easier as the technology matures and the capability is built into browsers. It’s already there for the Macintosh in Safari. But, for Windows, there are only a few options now:

If you use Yahoo as your homepage, you can click on the My Yahoo icon at the left side of our blog page and that will add the “feed” to your Yahoo homepage. You’ll see it just like your news headlines. This is a very, very easy way to do this (assuming you are using Yahoo as your homepage). If you are not using Yahoo as your homepage and want to, visit Yahoo , click on the My Yahoo icon at the top of the page. Arrange the page the way you want and make it your homepage. Then, visit our blog, click on the My Yahoo button and go from there.

If you already have a newsreader (you’re probably not reading this), just make your way to our XML feed and add us. Our XML feed is at: http://blog.treasuredlocks.com/feed/
It is important to subscribe to the XML feed link and not the regular blog link. If you don’t already have a newsreader, this is going to be a little more tricky. There are several newsreaders available and they all work a little differently.

• Pluck is an integrated newsreader that installs itself in your browser. That’s nice and convenient. There are versions for both Internet Explorer and Firefox. We found it pretty easy to use. But, it’s supported by ads, which you might find annoying. And, in the short time we played with it, we could not figure out how to get from the article back to the main blog.
• Awasu is a stand-alone application (that also doubles as a browser). It’s kind of complicated. But, for Windows, we like it best. It allows you to click on an article in the reader to actually visit the website. Downside, is you have to download a separate application and run it and it was a little difficult figuring out how to get a feed into the reader. But, once we got our feed in, we liked the way it worked.
• NetNewsReader Lite is great. But, it’s for MacIntosh only. Very easy to use. It was bought by NewsGator. Hopefully, they’ll come out with a Windows version.
• Safari (also for MacIntosh) has a built-in reader.
• There are web-based readers, too, where you visit their site to find your news. NewsGator is one of those. We didn’t really like having to visit a site to find our news. But, it seems to work pretty well.

If all of this is way too confusing to you, don’t despair. You can always just periodically visit our blog at http://blog.treasuredlocks.com and read it at your leisure. Make sure you bookmark it.

We often get these two related questions:

Is there something to make my hair grow really fast?
Is there something to fix my hair loss?

The difference between the two questions is the first group of people have hair growing in a normal pattern but it is not as thick or growing as quickly as they would like. The second group of people actually have areas where hair is growing either extremely slowly or not at all.Hair loss is a fairly complicated subject. We will cover that elsewhere. But, quickly, hair loss can be caused by a variety of reasons some easily treated (such as improper nutrition) and some not so easily treated (like male pattern baldness).

Generally speaking over-the-counter products such as our supplements will help with the easier to treat forms of hair loss. They will also help hair grow faster, longer , stronger and thicker. There are also supplements that can help with hair growth (see our Hair Growth Supplements). If your hair is damaged, your nutrition is not optimal (and whose is?) or you have a scalp condition there are things that can promote normal hair growth that will make it appear your hair is growing faster. Also, if you hair is breaking off, it will appear that it is not growing. By preventing that breakage, your hair will become longer. Before you run out and buy a super pill or an ointment, make sure you’re doing the day-to-day things to give your hair a chance to grow on its own. Our Treasured Locks H2G Hair Growth Serum is a topical (you rub it on your scalp) product that can help with hair growth. Our hair growth serum is a carefully selected blend of Emu Oil, Shea Butter Oil and other plant oils along with some Essential Oils that have been clinically shown to improve circulation, provide moisture, reduce inflammation and help hair grow to its fullest potential.

There are only a couple of over-the-counter medications that will help with serious hair loss. For men, there is Minoxidil (aka Rogaine) and Propecia. For women, there is Rogaine. These have been formulated in different packages and formulas with enabling compounds added.

© 2004-2007 Treasured Locks, LLC All Rights Reserved. Reprint In Its Entirety. With Written Permission Only

Well, people don’t always ask if there is literally a pill. But, we do get a lot of people who want a quick fix. They want to buy a single product that will cure all their ills. The short answer is there isn’t one. To the pill question, proper nutrition is essential for the health of your hair and protein is necessary. We do offer supplements that can help with the health of your hair and skin. However, there is no pill that will overcome the damage you do to you hair by not properly maintaining it. Taking proper care of your hair is the only way to ensure it will remain healthy. There is no single thing you can put in your mouth or put on your hair to make it begin growing like a Chia pet (at least nothing that you’d really want in your body or on your hair). The way to fix your hair problems is the old fashioned way “Earn it”. You’ve got to develop a healthy regimen for your hair and stick to it. We’re here to supply you with the knowledge and the products you need. We want to help you get your hair in the best shape possible. But, we will not promise you a quick fix or sell you snake oil that cures all ills.