FINE HAIR SOLUTIONS:

FINE HAIR SOLUTIONS:

Introduction

Model With Fine Strands Shear Genius 3 2010

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Nothing underscores life's irony like career paths. While one of my friends, a complete teetotaler, became a brand manager at Seagram's Liqueur, I, with my baby fine, impossibly slow-to-grow hair, ended up writing for cosmetology textbooks, salon and beauty magazines, and even hair care manufacturers.

Talk about initiation by fire! Suddenly, I was expected to have a hurricane mane (like half the women around me) and to be a hair expert. I was flooded with requests from hairdressers to perm or cut my hair--more pointedly, they'd say, "You have to cut that mop; fine hair looks terrible that long."

Back then, the thinking was that fine hair never looked good unless it was cut into a super-short bob and the tactics for getting clients were clearly unrefined.

Throughout my 25+ year career, I've been in hundreds of salons, from London to Moscow, New York to San Francisco, and had haircuts that ranged from $15 to $250+. I've also had every cut imaginable, a slew of bad perms and hair colors I shouldn't have tried.

Naturally, fine hair became my forte and I explored countless techniques for "enhancing" fine hair, ranging from undercutting, in which short pieces of hair "plump" up longer surface strands to create volume, to relaxing fine hair, since sodium hydroxide "will really blow up the cuticle," transforming fine, straight strands into a real bomb. (I passed on actually trying the later.)

If you're ready for the best, the worst and what really works, here's 25+ year's worth of hard-earned knowledge, straight from the best hairdressers in the world--and the real-life litmus test!