If like me, you don’t have the time, budget, or patience to sit through a salon hair treatment, you’re going to want the Kracie Dear Beauté Himawari Oil in Treatment Gloss & Repair to your shower essentials ASAP.

To be honest, I never really cared much about my hair before I let Sam dye my hair (for the first time ever!) in a rocking purple hue. While I totally loved the crazy color, the bleaching process totally fried my hair to the texture of straw. My hair became dry and rough and prone to tangles and split ends! For a while I tried to manage it with tubs of conditioning treatments that only seemed to help if I applied them every day. Eventually I got tired of doing these daily 10 minute-long hair masks, and just had the damaged hair chopped off.

I recently cut and dyed my hair teal as inspired by my iconic ‘90s mahou shoujo inspiration, Sailor Mercury! I used my favorite hair dye of all time, the Arctic Fox Vegan Hair Dye in Aquamarine, which is a brand known for their bright and long-lasting colors. Here’s a photo of me feeling very cute with my freshly-dyed lob alongside the official art of Sailor Mercury!

Hair loss is a sensitive topic for many women. We often feel that it’s a condition reserved for men, or women beyond a certain age, if at all. But hair fall can actually begin any time after puberty, and is more common than you think!

Female-pattern baldness is also more difficult to spot, since it occurs around the part of your hair, rather than a receding hairline or thinning crown that men experience. Some hair fall is also normal as hair naturally renews itself, with figures varying from the loss of 50 to 300 strands daily.

Throughout history, hair has been considered our “crowning glory” - status symbol, fashion accessory, and beauty standard all rolled in (or up) into one glorious ‘do. But, let’s be honest: there’s only so much our natural follicles can do, so many have turned to the power of the hairpiece to make their desired statement.

Having naturally wavy, chemically-treated strands that I compulsively wash almost daily means that I am basically a frizz magnet at the first sign of humidity. To help manage my mane issues, especially when I have to leave the house looking a little more presentable, I tend to wash my hair the night before to let everything settle. I also rely on the magic of dry shampoo!

I know that hair vinegar sounds like a sketchy concept, but it's an idea that's been around for a while. You might have read about hair rinses that includes vinegar to better cleanse the scalp, but no one actually wants to smell like they did it. Right? Enter commercial hair vinegars. Thank me later.

So why do you need hair vinegars anyway? Think of it as the first step to double-cleansing your scalp properly. Most of the time, normal shampoo isn't enough to rid your hair of product build-up (this one more than anything), dead skin, oil, and dirt, so you'll need a separate product to break it all down. If you have that feeling of your hair being heavy and greasy at the roots, then it means that you need something with more cleansing power than your everyday shampoo.

Kérastase Philippines just launched a new haircare line, Kérastase Résistance Extentioniste, as their first hair program designed to optimize and reinforce the length of damaged hair. It features Creatine-R Complex, a natural amino acid that is usually found in workout supplements. It is meant to improve strength, increase muscle mass and help muscles recover quicker during exercise. Recherche Avancée L’Oréal Research Institute has harnessed this technology to create a ‘training program’ for hair that will strengthen and reinforce hair’s internal structure, which is supposed to assist in uninterrupted lengthening.

This line claims to induce hair growth of up to 4cm in just 3 months of consistent use. Average hair growth is at 1cm per month, but if you’re impatient about growing your hair like I am, the product promise has definitely gotten me intrigued!

The year: 2013. The mission: leg hair removal. I was a college student on a hunt for a waxing salon in Quezon City. When a sugaring salon had no more slots, I decided to try my luck at a nearby salon whose name I cannot remember anymore. My plan was to get a half leg wax, something I started doing at 14, and considered myself to be a veteran waxee. I remember technicians saying “masakit ‘yan ‘di ba?” to each other while I nonchalantly read a magazine as they ripped my hair away.

Watsons sales are always something to look forward to, and this May 26 they're offering up to 50% off on our favorite hair products! Whatever #HairGoals you have on your list, you can soon cross them out with help from Watsons.

When it comes to hair styling products, Eva NYC has been a pretty reliable brand since they came out in 2012. Their Hungry Hair Oil Treament received good reviews for dry hair, and Kim had a great experience with the Healthy Heat Ceramic Styling Iron. While I’m mostly a wash-and-go kind of girl when it comes to my hair, there are days I do need to be a little more polished than usual. Hair products in spray form are easiest to apply, and you can find one for every kind of hair concern. Here's what I got to try for my low-maintenance requirements:

About five years ago, pastels, vibrant purples, and neon greens were just hair colors of fantasy characters, or rock stars, or the token ‘cool’ Asian in movies. Maybe you’d see someone with burgundy (but almost brown) hair once in a while, but in general we stuck to our blacks and browns. Fast-forward to today where non-neutral hair color is almost (but not quite) commonplace, especially in art communities and schools that allow it. Lightening and coloring hair used to be really intimidating since products need to be mixed and often had to be sourced online.

Nowadays, we have better access to these "crazy colors", with brands like Sparks becoming available in SM Beauty. If you've been curious to try it out, take advantage of the summer break and this DIY guide to have some fun with color!

Hair, as they say, is your crowning glory. Great hair can really be a nice finishing touch to an A-game face but when it comes to my curls, I find its best to leave them alone. Before I learned to love them, I went through the whole phase of getting them rebonded regularly and using a straightening iron to remove any kinks. I use gentle shampoo formulas, conditioners and a lot of hair treatments to keep them in good shape, but I never brush my hair!  

Hair can do SO MUCH for one’s appearance, yet it is the hardest for me to put some effort into. I studied it a bit as part of my makeup artist training, and though I know how style hair, I rarely touch my own. See, I have crazy hair fall, so doing anything more than breathing puts me in anxiety over additional loss of strands.

While the products we apply to our hair and scalp do matter, it's important to revisit the tools we use, too. Thankfully, two new awesome hair tools have made their way to the Philippines, and they’re making hairstyling so much easier!

When I received the Ikoo Brush to test, I was so impressed by the gorgeous tin packaging and smooth contours of the brush itself. It's probably the coolest hair brush I've ever seen in my life! When I brushed my hair with it though, I found the bristles scratchy compared to my Wet Brush. "James, do you want a new hair brush?" I asked my partner. He shrugged and started brushing his hair with it. And kept on brushing. On and on. 

I've since took note of how different shampoos affect my scalp and hair, and was shocked to discover that certain variants would actually cause breakouts near my hairline. I knew that certain skincare ingredients should be avoided, and a quick look at the ingredients list of shampoos I used revealed they all had one thing in common: sulfates.

I’m perpetually jealous of people with nice hair. I see people with healthy tresses all the time and wonder, how do they do it?! I had always promised myself to get better at hairstyling, so I welcomed the Healthy Heat Ceramic Styling Iron from Eva NYC with open arms.

I cursed my frizzy, curly hair as a child of the '90s. Back then, there were no Korean stars with gorgeous perms so everyone coveted the sleek, straight ‘do they saw in shampoo commercials. Like most girls that time, I regularly rebonded my hair for years and years! When I moved to the US for graduate school, I discovered that rebonding procedures are not common there and that regular trips to the salon would be way too much for my student budget. There was also no way I could afford to spend hours with a straightening iron everyday. I felt that I had no choice but to grow my hair out and slowly cut the straightened ends until they were completely gone.

If you have wavy, fine hair like mine then you know the infinite and often rather literal pain of detangling it while it's still wet. That's why the Wet Brush - a brush designed specifically for detangling wet hair - was such a game changer for me when I first tried it two years ago. It's been in my dresser ever since! I even got a smaller version for my tennis bag so I can brush my hair in peace after working out.

I very rarely talk about hair products because so few of them actually work for my super picky hair. Just to give you a picture: I have fine, fine strands prone to breakage and hair fall, and on top of that I have developed an oily scalp over the years. I manage it with a good cleansing routine and lightweight hair styling products, but it's a delicate balance. One wrong hair product and it could take my hair and scalp weeks to recuperate!