When Bad Extensions Ruin Good Hair Part 2

In this episode, Amanda Miller shares real-life stories and expert insights on hair growth, extension techniques, and fixing common salon mishaps. Whether you're a stylist or client, discover practical tips to improve hair health, extension skills, and spotting bad hair jobs.

Key Topics:

• How adding weight to hair via knots or beads can stimulate growth
• Success stories of hair lengthening through extensions
• Common extension installation mistakes and how to avoid them
• The dangers of unprofessional topper gluing and bad extension practices
• Tips for stylists to improve coloring and customization of extensions
• The importance of experience and repetition in mastering extension techniques
• How social media influences perceptions of expertise versus real skill
• Upcoming podcast feature on health, hair loss, and GLP-1 treatments

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

And we're back with all the technical difficulties. I love it when the internet goes out. Okay, Miller, you were saying you're from the horse industry.

SPEAKER_01 0:08

I am kind of in the horse world and what when people want their horse's tails to grow out, they take their tail into small pieces and they they'll like tie a knot in it and put it in there so it puts more weight on it to pull down to make the tail grow more. Slightly reminds me of extensions when you put a bead on it because it's like a little something to like put a little bit. Not all you're not that you're putting much weight on it, but it's a little something to like, I feel like that's gonna make the hair grow a little bit faster.

SPEAKER_00 0:34

Yeah. I mean, a perfect example of this is I've had two clients in particular that had like chin-length French bobs. And they never could grow out their bobs because they're, I mean, bobs and pixies are like so hard to grow out. There's always an awkward stage, no one loves it. And so they end up just always cutting it back to the its original length because it gets a little bit longer and it just looks ugly and it's hard to style. And then they met me and I was like, you should get extensions. I bet you'd have to have these for maybe a year, if that. And both of them, one in particular, grew out her extension, grew out her hair for a year, maybe a year and a half. We took her extensions out, and now her hair is literally down her back, and she's never had it so long and healthy. And that was all from having extensions. For her in particular, I think the extensions helped her hair grow, you know, not only from like the weight distribution and things like that. She has a baby fine hair, but she also was styling and her extensions were getting the majority of the styling, and she didn't have to style as often because her extensions held the style so well. Now, client number two kind of had the same situation, all although she was a really active lifestyle. So what she was doing is she was washing and blow drying every single day, and her hair was just going through it on the heat settings, trying to style it and make it look good. And she never really did anything else with it because every single day after she worked out, she felt like she had to wash it. So now she has extensions. She actually just got a new set of extensions. She's had them for a year and a half. And her hair is, she had, like I said, she had French bob chin length and now she's like mid boob length. And she's loves them because it's transformed the way her ponytail looks and the way her hair holds the style. So she doesn't have to wash and blow dry every single day.

SPEAKER_01 2:09

I feel like there are proof, there's proof too. Every time that you do a move up, right? You can see the growth. The growth the bead doesn't lie, right? Like if the hair wasn't growing, the bead would stay up and tight. Not you wouldn't have, you know, two, three inches of grow out.

SPEAKER_00 2:22

Yes, beads do slide if you're using the wrong, if you're using the wrong ones and things like that. Yes, for sure. But you're definitely on the right track mode. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:30

Proof is there.

SPEAKER_00 2:30

Proof is in the pudding. Yeah. Proof is there. I think that you've seen some interesting installs from my chair from other stylists over the years. Yes or no?

SPEAKER_01 2:39

Oh my gosh. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 2:40

What was your top five favorites?

SPEAKER_01 2:42

Number one, most disturbing thing I have ever seen, which is an Instagram reel. So please go look at her Instagram was the girl that came in with a glued on topper.

SPEAKER_00 2:52

Okay. So a little bit of backstory. This was a client that had Bellamine put the method put in by somebody else in St. Louis. It was super uncomfortable. They were showing. She was out of town, actually in a really large city. And she had found someone just like, hey, can you just cut these out? They're uncomfortable and I don't want to keep them. So they proceeded to cut the extensions out, but they didn't cut the extension and like the stitching. They cut like her actual hair above the row. So if you're a stylist, you know exactly what I'm talking about. So she had like two to five inches of like two to three inches long, where they literally physically cut her beads out of her hair or her hair with the beads in it. And then they told her, like, hey, unfortunately, you're gonna need another type of extension because you can't walk out like this. And they glued a topper to the top of her head to her natural hair. Was she balding? No. Did she have like any scalp showing on the top? No. Um, and when she came to me, I had seen photos of it, but I wasn't really sure like what it was gonna look like. Miller, what did it look like to you?

SPEAKER_01 3:46

It looked like someone took a hot glue gun and poured it around the top of her head and smashed a cone on top of it.

SPEAKER_00 3:53

And okay, let's talk about like, yeah, there's like mesh integration methods and things like this out there, but this was like a rubber piece of plastic with basically hair on top of it and then her hair underneath it. And the hard part about this is she has had when I saw her, she had had it for three weeks. So there was water getting underneath that topper and it was basically molding and tingling, and she was still trying to like wash her hair and keep it healthy, and it was causing so much pain on the top of her hair. So it took my assistant and I like maybe two hours to get it out, but the glue that was used was so gnarly, it was like rubber sticky cement.

SPEAKER_01 4:30

I'm telling you, it looked like someone hot glued her head.

SPEAKER_00 4:33

Yeah, and the worst part about this is like it wasn't even like a natural hairline that someone had put in, like I said, with mesh or anything like that. Like this was like, it literally looked like something from I don't know, the Halloween shop that has plastic underneath it and it's just like plopped on top of her head. Yes. So we got it out. We ended up giving her two rows of extensions. She's now had the Miller method and the standard hair extensions for I think eight weeks. I think she just came in for her second move up. And that hair in the back where it was like obviously cut out is now like three or four inches long. It's doing really well. Her natural hair and her scalp is like so much healthier, and it really just has transformed for her. I was actually really shocked that she even wanted to do extensions again, given the whole topper situation. God, I would have been terrified. Absolutely terrified. Miller, now what's one of your other uh top five?

SPEAKER_01 5:22

Fried off blonde hair, and she probably had five rows of Bellamy and it was going all the way down to the very base of her neck. Like there was nothing to cover it. You could just, you could see it. It was horrible.

SPEAKER_00 5:36

So once again, this is another like situation where a client had had rows really where you shouldn't put them. The extensions didn't match her hair. Her hair was like teeny tiny short pieces fried. She had someone put like K-tips in the front and then all these wefts in the back. And, you know, this is a situation where like really already processed hair will do better with better extensions, but also like a better method on top of that. This is also a really great example of like someone that already has really compromised hair is there the certain expectation can't be 22, 28 extensions. And, you know, for me, I was like, hey, I can definitely make this look better, but our expectations have to be a little bit different. And ultimately, no was not what she wanted to hear. No, no one wants to hear no. No, but like I something about what's really interesting is like I I can always see the grief on people's faces when I tell them no. For sure. And I'm I'm never like saying it from a place of like to be mean. When I'm saying no, I'm actually not making any money. No. I'm I always have the client's best interest in mind because here's the thing if I were to say yes just to do it, at the end of the day, if there's damage or issues, the client's gonna see it. If I can see it, they're gonna see it. And also, I'm trying to build trust with the client for the longevity of where they want their hair to be. Sometimes that's not serving them by doing what they want.

SPEAKER_01 6:55

Yeah. Let's see, some other ones that I've seen that are really bad. Uh, you had a girl come in who had, I don't even know what kind of bands you would call it of different colors going throughout her hair. And then her extensions were a completely different color than what her hair was. They did like blatant, not even like you couldn't even make them blend in if you tried. They were so bad colored. Like I just, it blows my mind that someone will let you walk out of a salon where you can just, I mean, anybody could have looked at her and been like, she has two completely different pieces and they're not cut to match. So it was like a shelf going across of extensions and then a shelf of her regular hair above, and you're like, this is horrible.

SPEAKER_00 7:39

I'm just laughing that you can see that because like you've really learned a lot.

SPEAKER_01 7:44

I mean, let's be honest. One of my favorite things now is when I travel or when I'm in the airport or something, is I will see bad hair, bad color, or really bad extensions.

SPEAKER_00 7:55

That's usually when I have to tell you to quit pointing and put your hand out. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:58

I because I will. I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_00 7:59

But look down, Miller, look down, look down, don't be so obvious.

SPEAKER_01 8:01

Yeah. Or I'm over there like trying to sneakily take a photo with my phone and send it to you.

SPEAKER_00 8:06

And you know, I think when it comes like back to the client that you were just talking about, that comes back to custom coloring and not just like taking extensions out of a package and plopping them in people's hair. Here's the thing I've done a lot of time and energy to create a line that I felt like would really work for stylists and for clients. So clients aren't paying stylists to custom color as much and stylists aren't having to custom color as much. Now, that doesn't mean that's gonna completely eliminate it, eliminate it altogether. But, you know, if you can see that something doesn't match what I what I just said before, a client can see it too. And if the wind blows and their hair parts and the roots orange and their hair is dark like mine, like what are we doing? Why are we letting people walk out like that?

SPEAKER_01 8:48

Well, and if a dude sees it, tell me a girl doesn't see it. And girls are judgy as fuck.

SPEAKER_00 8:53

That's true, that's very, very true.

SPEAKER_01 8:55

I promise you, if your hair looks like that and you're walking down the street, every girl that you walk past that has decent hair is gonna judge the shit out of you.

SPEAKER_00 9:03

Well, and like here's the thing like let's say you're a stylist and you like do a bang up job of putting uh extensions in, that's awesome. And maybe you're struggling with coloring them. Dude, there's so many great resources out there to learn how to custom color extensions. What I would recommend to you is anytime I have a client that's gonna get new extensions, I always ask them, hey, do you want to keep your old hair? And if they want to keep their old hair, I give it back to them. And if they want to throw it away, I'll actually keep it and I'll use it as practice hair for my assistants so they can hair that would be thrown away that's old anyway. If they mess it up, who cares? And this is a really great opportunity for them to learn on. If you're a stylist and let's say you don't have a lot of extra money to buy extra hair to play around with, you know, Amazon actually has like white swatches that you can buy for like pennies on the dollar that you could mess around with. Now, is it probably gonna be, you know, plastic or synthetic or all the things? Yes. But if you have any clients that are getting rid of their old hair and they don't want to keep it for vacation hair or whatever, don't throw it away. Keep it for yourself and play with, you know, learning those formulations to correct the color and to bring it back to life. That's the best easy free learning tool.

SPEAKER_01 10:08

Practice makes perfect.

SPEAKER_00 10:09

Yeah, for sure. Getting repetition and reps. Extensions come to repetition and reps, just like everything else in this industry.

SPEAKER_01 10:15

100%. Yeah. It's like we said, it's you're gonna do a hundred, a thousand, and thousand heads. What do they say? They say kind of everything, right? 10,000 hours is like what it takes to get really good at something. And I think that's true in everything that you do.

SPEAKER_00 10:29

Yeah. But I think that's the the problem is like social media skips that, right? It's like you, you know, stylists see these uh stylists they will aspire to be like, and they're missing all those years of what it took to get there.

SPEAKER_01 10:40

Yeah. No one sees all the grind and all the time that it takes. They just see they're seeing the result that you're showing in a video.

SPEAKER_00 10:47

Yeah, because everybody's an expert, right? Everybody's showing their like expert work.

SPEAKER_01 10:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:52

And if you're a new stylist, like if this is where you're living right now and you're really trying to like hone in on your timing and your skills and your details, like lean into that because at some point you're gonna be that expert too. It's just gonna take some time to get there. And that just comes with repetitions. That doesn't come with social media, that doesn't come, you know, with working less. It it actually is the opposite. It comes with a lot of repetition and doing as much of it as you possibly can to get really good at it.

SPEAKER_01 11:20

Yeah. And that reputation, repetition builds reputation. And that's what it takes to get there.

SPEAKER_00 11:26

For sure. And being humble about it.

SPEAKER_01 11:27

Correct.

SPEAKER_00 11:28

I know. All right, guys. Stay tuned. I actually have a podcast coming down the pipeline. I am going to be interviewing an internal medicine doctor from Arizona. His name's Dr. Sean McGumber, and he is gonna be going over GLP ones, hair loss, internal medicine, and how it can benefit you and what you should do about it if you are doing GLP ones. So stay tuned.

SPEAKER_01 11:47

See you guys.