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About Kerasoft Products

Black Hair

Kerasoft hair care products were designed to make your hair look shinier, with a silky feel, that is much more easy to style.  We know what you desire is to have hair that is soft, touchable and most importantly, healthy looking.  Kerasoft® offers a complete line of advanced hair care products that gently cleanse, superbly condition and enhance not only Black hair styles, but all hair styles with natural curl, so that your hair always looks and feels its healthy best.

Why Kerasoft Products?
 
The history of Kerasoft is the history of semi-natural Wash & Wear hair, or as many people call it texturized hair.
 
It was the 1980s' and Jheri curls were the rage. If people are of a "certain age" there will be very few who, if they are being honest, won't admit to having a Curl in their hair during this period. For us at the salon doing "Curls" was huge part of our business, but it certainly did have its down side for both our clients and us. The downside for our clients where products that were greasy, staining not only their clothes and pillows, and on top of that it was an expensive service for our clients because of the time and labour needed to do one. The down side for us was it smell, the products needed to do Curls and Body Waves are ammonia based and off gas quite a bit and time. We did not take short cuts when doing our curls. What we mean is that to get a tremendous looking Curly perm you have to get as many perm rods into the head as possible. Most salons were doing what is called "Railroad Tracking" which is laying rods one after another, in neat rows, down the top and up the side. We were using a method called "Brick Laying", which is as it sounds laying perm rods in a ways that they are interlaced like bricks in a wall. Brick Laying takes about twice as long as railroad tracking and on average gets about twice as many rods into the head that makes for a much better, more natural looking result.

 
Around 1986 we took notice that when hair was under processed in a traditional relaxer service, when wet, it looked quite similar in many respects to the Curly Perms we were doing. It was one of those "Ah-ha" moments for us and we began testing this method of processing hair to see if this could be a viable alternative to having a Curl done. What we found was that it most certainly could be. Take a look at the top photo on this page, this model was done in 1989 and was done for a newspaper ad for our new service (hence the B&W photo, as colour at the time was not needed for news print ads). Everyone at the time though she had a curl in her hair and when she told them "no it's a relaxer", people wanted to know more about this service. This was happening more and more to our other clients as well as we transitioned them from Curly Perms and Body Waves to what we began calling our Wash & Wear relaxer.
 

At that time the was no Kerasoft products and to do this new service we needed to carry products from 6 different product companies in our to do the service and care for the hair afterward. We used the relaxer from one company, as its consistency, of all the relaxers we tried, was the closest to what we needed in terms of strength and texture to give the result we were looking for. We carried a neutralizing shampoo from another company beause we found it left the hair feeling so much better that the one from the relaxer company. We carried a leave-in conditioner from another company as for Wash & Wear hair a leave-in needs to do certain things and not other, as well as a deep conditioner from another. We carried a shampoo from one more company because of its detangling and conditioning properties and it was non SLS based (sodium lauryl sulfate). Finally, we carried at home care products from another to for our clients to maintain their hair at home.

 The thing that all these products, at least for us, had in common were that each and every one of them was in some way a compromise because in the 80s' there just were not any companies making products to do Wash & Wear hair. Our thoughts were, if we had our say could every product could be tweaked to be better and give our clients even better looking hair. We decided to have our say.

 

  

 

We invite you to have a look at a video clip to see real results on real people in our Wash & Wear Client Testimonials, the link is below. The video clip also includes snippets from our instructional Wash & Wear Relaxer Video Application Guide. We want to assure you that all the models on the testimonial clip (with the exception of one, our assistant manager) come from our salon client base and were not paid for their participation or endorsement. They love their Kerasoft products, what it does for their hair and want the world to know about a wonderful line of hair care products.

  

Click on images to enlarge.
 
 
 The Passion Of Great Hairstylists To Do Better Hair
 
 
Kerasoft was born out of the passion of a team of great hairstylists wanting to do even better hair. We decided in 1993 to stop compromising and do something about it. Over the next two years we began the labour intensive process of bringing our thoughts on what the perfect product line would be into reality. Working closely with some of the best cosmetic chemists, both locally and internationally, we began to see the products we had been wishing we had available for use come into reality. We must admit, it took a little longer than we thought it would , but after two years of testing we felt the perfect product line we had told ourselves was possible was finally finished in early 1995. We made these products to be used on our own clients in our salon, so without a doubt Kerasoft products are made of the finest ingredients and without compromise. We know as professionals how healthy hair should look and feel and we made Kerasoft products to do this.
 
 
 
Sharing the Knowledge
  
Our clients had urged us for years to share how to do the Wash & Wear service with other styists so more people could  enjoy its benefits and stop destroying their hair with bone straight relaxers. In a number of prior years our Jazma Artistic Team had done advance hair cutting classes at the two biggest Black beauty trade shows in the US every year, the American Health and Beauty Aids Institute(AHBAI) in Chicago and later in the year the Bronner Brothers Beauty Show in Atlanta, so we requested the organizers of the first show, the AHBAI show, to add a class on Wash & Wear relaxers to the educational seminar schedule, which they did. We were so excited to share with others stylists how to do what we learned to do, from 1985 to date, and educate them where you can easily go wrong and share tips on how to get things right. Well, as always, our cutting class was sold out, but disappointingly we had only 10 stylists attend our Wash & Wear class who at the end of class were just blown away with the knowledge they had gained from attending (the ad from the show program is above and to the right). The class was poorly attended because at that time stylists just didn't get how we could say "curly, coily, crimpy and kinky" hair could be beautiful, especially after a relaxing service. They just didn't get it, in the minds of stylists then if you were relaxing hair it had to be bone straight. 

At the 1995 Bronner Bothers show we did later in the year we decided to make the class free, open to any licensed stylist to attend who paid admission to the show (that show ad is also above, note that is Asha, one of our salon's founders and not a Wash & wear model in the ad). This class was standing room only. It was made up of almost every stylist who took our paid cutting class, The Secret Tips to a Perfect Haircut. The class was a bit raucous, with most stylists still not quite getting why we would doing a relaxer and not wanting to take it straight. Over the next few years we did other free classes all packed with hair stylists, both those who came out of curiosity and those seeking knowledge of how to preserve their clients hair.
 
 
Forward Thinkers 
 
In retrospect the good news was that there has been, and will always be dreamers and forward thinkers out there. At those Wash & Wear classes we had the chance to meet some of them. We like to think in sharing our knowledge with the hundreds of hair stylists who attended our Wash & Wear classes over the years we played a part in planting healthier hair care seeds that continue to grow.
 
That's why you should try our Keraosft product line, we made it because we truly care about great looking, healthy hair.