By Susan Elise Campbell
With a name like Consciously Curly Salon, there is little question which market Logan Spring is targeting for her new hair studio at 123 Dunning Street in Malta.
Not all curls are the same. Ninety-seven percent of people have some curl or wave in their hair, Spring said. She tells clients to respect their hair’s natural texture and not hide or change it using mainstreamed products, as the hair industry wants people to do.
“I am a rebel in the industry,” she said. “Most salons focus on short-term results with typical treatments, but hair becomes less healthy in the long term because of the toxic ingredients most manufacturers use.”
“My clients are people who want sustainable results and healthier hair,” she said. “People keep looking for a magic product, but what they need is a better way to hydrate their hair.”
So many health-conscious women are looking for solutions like these that Spring said that after only eight weeks her appointment book was already filled through November.
Spring offers much more than a hair cut. Every experience is an opportunity to educate how nat-ural products can make hair healthier. Her menu of services ranges from a 30-minute color consultation to wash and style with or without a haircut to a 12-week comprehensive master-course online.
She is an MBA and industrial engineer by trade. Her career involved teaching students at nanotechnology schools how to read trade journals, a skill that helped her not only research brands of hair care products, but also teach her viewership how to read product labels.
Then last year, Spring realized that since she started her online business and was cutting her own hair that no one had yet stepped in to fill this niche. She went to cosmetology school and then right into salon ownership.
“What happens in the beauty industry is a kind of trap, where you want a little bit more hold or definition or a little less tangling,” she said. “But most products are laced with synthetics, pol-ymers, plastics, and oils that coat the hair, giving you a short-term solution just long enough to think the product is working.”
“Actually the product is decimating any chances of your hair being healthy on its own by blocking out water and keeping the hair in a chronically dehydrated state,” she said. The word “moisture” or “moisturizing” on a label doesn’t mean hydration, but oils and polymers “that cause hair to suffocate.”
This is the kind of knowledge “not being taught in cosmetology schools” because training is “driven by product formulations, which focus on making money through temporary results,” she said.
But Spring cares most about hair health, and by extension the health of her clients, than profit. She has partnered with Innersense Organic Beauty, a line of clean shampoos, treatments and styling products that she sells at the salon.
“This is the cleanest line of hair products in the world,” she said. Clean ingredients means no preservatives, harmful chemicals, or fragrance.
“Manufacturers are allowed to throw in all kinds of ingredients and call them fragrance, and these might include carcinogens,” she said.
Now Spring is helping people break free from the conventional beauty methods promoted in school.
“People are using 12 to 20 products every day and have to stop this cycle, because there are health consequences to layering on questionable, highly concerning ingredients,” she said. “The studies that do exist suggest many of these ingredients disrupt a woman’s hormones and reproductive system.”
The biggest challenge for Spring was getting money for cosmetology school. She was re-searching various grants and scholarships when she remembered how Innersense assisted its network of stylists with financial help to support them during the pandemic.
“I drafted an email to the owners that I was in a highly underserved area, and would they know of any resources for an up-and-coming stylist,” she said. “I had a response in half an hour.”
“Innersense had just finished developing a scholarship fund and said I could be in the alpha class,” she said. “So within thirty minutes of deciding to go to cosmetology school, I had tui-tion.”
Spring offers much more than a hair cut. Every experience is an opportunity to educate how to natural products make hair healthier. Her menu of services ranges from a 30-minute color con-sultation to wash and style with or without a haircut to a 12-week comprehensive master-course online.
“This program is the culmination of everything I’ve learned,” said Spring. She has studied curly hair techniques “with the best mentors in the country” and said that her “accelerated learning came from teaching.”
“There is no way I’ll be able to keep up with demand, so I’ll take on an apprentice in a year or two,” she said. “The more curly hair specialists in the community, the better.”
Spring said that entrepreneurs distinguish themselves by enduring “even through those peri-ods when you’re feeling this is just not worth it.”
“Go back to the nine to five,” Spring said. “It’s the people who push through who make it.”