 Hi, beautiful. How are you doing today? You look stunning. Now hear me out. I hope that you think of me as your gay best friend. I am there for you for all of your hair and beauty needs, okay? I hope that if you do not have a gay best friend, recommending hair things to you and telling you how to do your hair, that I am there for you, okay? And today is no exception. Today's video is sponsored. But wait, before you get a little turned off by that, I know sometimes you hear sponsored and you think like, oh, they're doing it for the money, like this is gonna be stupid. Hear me out. Today's video is sponsored by Esalon. I wanna do some things differently today with the sponsorship. I am going to give you the lowdown of what happens when I get a sponsorship and why I chose to make a video about Esalon today. Of course, you guys know every sponsorship has money attached to it. We do get paid for doing these things. I think the misconception with sponsorships is that we take whatever is given to us if there's money attached, which is not the case for all of us. I know I definitely take a lot of things into consideration, especially when, you know, I'm doing a sponsorship that is for at home color, which obviously I will get into why I chose to do it. But I wanted to tell you it is sponsored because I really do believe in the product. If you've ever thought about coloring your hair at home for the first time, but you don't know where to start, today's video will be just for you. If you already get your hair colored at a salon, you get retouches done or you get a full on color or you do whatever at a salon, but you don't wanna go as often to the salon or you want something that you can do in between salon visits. Today's video is for you, but I'm gonna tell you exactly what went through my head when I got this offer and exactly why I would recommend E-salon for anybody looking to color their own hair and do it more cost-effectively. I know that not everybody can afford to go to a salon and pay top dollar to get a really good hair done and here is another way you can get it done for less. So with that said, let's get into things. I'm ready. There's gonna be two, three parts to this video. I'm gonna go over everything that has to do with E-salon and reaching out to me and what happened when they reach out to me. And then we're gonna do a little thing. I miss Manny Quinn. Hey, baby, how are you doing? She'll be in here in a few minutes. You guys will see me test the product that I did a few days ago and then you'll see my little guinea pig of a client. Get her hair done with E-salon color and we'll see how that comes out. So first of all, I'm sure you guys know by now a lot of tea with what happens with the brand deal, right? Of course we use E-salon as an example today. They will reach out to me or my manager and they will ask, you know, would you like to do a sponsorship with us? Do you like our products? Have you used our product? Do you wanna try our product? And would you like to work with us? And then kind of the negotiation happens after that of what that will actually entail, how much money will be involved and how it will be communicated to my audience. But typically nowadays, brands give you your creative direction to do exactly what you want with the video in order to communicate to your audience. Cause obviously we know our audience is the best. How we communicate to you guys why this product is a great product. I'm not gonna lie when they reach out to me. I had a call with my manager and she told me about it. I told my manager this probably wouldn't work out. Basically, my first thought was like, this is at home hair color. I wouldn't recommend doing it. That scares the crap out of me. I mean, you've seen all the horrific things people have done to their hair online. You know, they go by whatever box dye they can find and they put it on their head and then they put the bleach on and everything just falls off and crumbles to death. However, after doing research, I did realize that all of the formulas are made to order and customized to your exact needs and specifications by a real colorist. Looking through all the information you filled out on the website and deciding the exact color formula you will need that is tailored specifically to you. These are salon quality ingredients. The next one was, of course, if any hair styles are watching, you might be thinking, wow, this takes away from salons. If this is the future of color, why do we have hair salons? Like, what's the T here? If you're a person that goes to a hair salon and you trust your hairdresser and that is your thing, that is probably going to stay your thing. If you're the person who loves that luxury of sitting in a chair and going to the salon and paying a large price to have that whole time to yourself and get your hair done, then that is your thing. There are a lot more people who do not go to salons. This is going to really be a great way to know exactly what you're putting on your hair and what's going into the formula because a real colorist is helping you out deciding what your exact formula should be. Say you get your retouches done every six weeks and you would like to get your retouches done more often, but you can't afford to get more retouches done. Now this gives you a way to do your retouches in between salon visits. You can do your retouch yourself every third week and then every six weeks you can go back to the salon and get your retouch done by your hairstylist and they can kind of do their hairstylist flair that they usually do. I was like, all right, this sounds like something that I'm definitely going to take part in. I'm feeling good about this. Here's the real kicker here. I don't know if you're ready for this one. I wasn't ready for this one. I don't even understand how this is possible, but your first order is $10 for a full head of color. If you're already convinced, the link is below. Are you done there? Shop now. With all that research done and coming to those conclusions myself, I was 50% there to being convinced. The last part of course, I needed to try their formulas. I need to actually know that these are great formulas and they are going to be what you guys ask for. A few days later, I got Islam on the phone and I asked, I need to try these out and I'm not trying them on a human being first because I wanna know what's the tea with your hair color. I'm gonna be honest, like I need to try it out first. Like obviously I'm not gonna recommend something if I haven't tried it out. I grabbed a new mannequin, I ordered one, a nice virgin haired mannequin because color doesn't look color. So if you already have color, you cannot lift your color to a different color. So I wanted to try out a few different colors so I can get a feel of all the range that they have. Why don't we just move to that clip and show you guys me trying out the color for the first time and opening the boxes that they sent me and seeing the whole experience for the first time and give you my exact feedback on what that first experience was like and how I thought the color came out. Let's go to that clip and then we'll meet you back here. Hi, okay, so I got my boxes. My address is on the other side of these boxes so I cannot show you the other side. Love stalkers and all, but I'm not trying to do that today. So I'm gonna open these boxes and we are gonna see what's going on inside of them and see how these actually work. Let's just open these babies up. I already kinda know what's going on inside because I've seen reviews. Everywhere I move these boxes, there's an address on it. But anyways, it says my name on the top of the box but I can't really show you because there's an address. So you open the box and let's see what we got here. This is really cute. It says Brad's Instructions. Okay, that is really cool. I did see this on the reviews I looked at and I was pretty blown away that they customize everything like that. That's not easy to do in production, is customize things like that. So hats off to you, Islam. Let's hope you actually work well though. Okay, so this is the medium blonde that I ordered. I ordered a natural golden blonde. My colorist name is Anna and it basically just gives you step by step on how you do it. So I'm not gonna go through it all today. Wow, it even says like what your blend is and like how they made the color. It says medium blonde, gold and a little bit of pearl. That is so cool with 20 volume developer which I think is perfect for this case. It comes with all of the essentials. We're not gonna go over everything here today but all the essentials to do your hair, shampoo, gloves. We have Brad's color. It literally says it on the package. That is so adorable. I don't even understand like that is a lot of work. These bottles are actually really nice too. This is the 20 volume developer and of course it's made for one head of hair. So you're gonna mix these two together and apply it onto the head. I love that it's already portioned out for you and super convenient and easy. Honestly, everything's looking really good. I hope this works well. They claim to be high quality professional ingredients and we're gonna test that out. I'm gonna open up the other boxes and see what else is going on in there. See what other colors I got. Red and brown I know I ordered but let's just see if they got it right first and then we'll move on. Let me take this. This one is medium brown, a purlish red. I'm really excited to try these out. Okay, so let's just keep these all organized here and make sure it's all good. I'm gonna keep the instructions with the color and so on. So we have our last color here which is the dark color I'm assuming. I hope so. And it is our dark brown. Perfect, they got everything right. So cheers to that. A dark brown with a little bit of neutralizer. Oh, it's a green neutralizer. So it's gonna counteract the red in her hair because red and green are opposite of the color wheel. So perfect. She does have a lot of warmth in her hair. I will show you Miss Manny Quinn in a second and let me get this all organized and put it into bowls and we'll test it out in three different sections on her head. We'll go real fast through this. I know it gets a little boring so we're gonna just fly through, test the color, see how it looks and hopefully it comes out good so that I can recommend it to you. Hey Miss Manny, what are you doing today? This is a new one. She looks like she hasn't slept in years. Okay, she looks a little disheveled to say the least here. Let's mix the color up and I'll show you that. The dark is gonna go in here, the red is gonna go in the pink one and the blonde is gonna go in the yellow one. All right, let's do it. All right, so it says to just mix these both together. So this is the blonde color we're doing first and just open this. You can also mix it in this applicator bottle so you don't have to actually use a bowl and a brush if you don't want to. You can apply with just the applicator. But I used to doing a bowl and a brush so I'm gonna do that. But whatever, I'll let you both. So it has a very gel-like consistency. As you can see, it's very blubbery which I actually really like more liquidy colors because I feel like you can use less of it and get more surface area covered because the hair color does penetrate all the way through without you actually having to do all the work because it is liquidy. It does tend to run through the different layers of your hair without you actually doing it. All right, I'm gonna quickly apply this blonde color and we'll be back to do the other ones. And of course, just to inform you guys, we are starting off with about a level seven and a half, pretty much neutral. So any colors out there are kinda wondering what's going on here and that is what is going on and we are lifting it to about an eight. So it's not gonna really make a gigantic difference but I do wanna see the blonde tone that it deposits and what's going on with that. Okay, so while that's processing, we're moving on to the dark brown. Let's mix this up and get it applied to the other side of her head. All right, two colors down. One more to go. Let's bust open the red, which I don't know. It just seems the most exciting to me right now. And let's put it in our pink bowl and let's get coloring and yeah, okay. This says here that it's a medium brown pro red so it is going to be still brown but it is going to have a red tint to it. All right, so I just finished the application of all the color on Miss Miniquin's head. She has three different colors processing right now. We're gonna let that sit for 30 minutes, rinse it off and blow dry it and I'll be back to show you guys the finished results up close and personal of what's going on with the color. Hopefully it's vibrant. Hopefully it has a lot of depth and hopefully every hair piece and fiber was covered properly. If it checks up all those three boxes, well then we have a winner here, almost. A little fun fact. I thought you might wanna laugh a little bit with me. I spent the entire time coloring her midlinks and ends before her roots and then I realized that Miss Miniquin is not a real person. Even though I make her into a real person sometimes in my head, she's not real. Therefore, she doesn't have heat coming from her scalp and she has no blood circulation because she's made out of plastic. I'm so sorry to close right here. And therefore I did not need to apply the ends before the roots but I did anyways. But if you're coloring your hair at home and you have virgin hair and you're doing a virgin color application, do start with your mids and ends before doing your roots. That way you get even color all the way through because the heat from your scalp makes hair color process faster which sometimes makes you have hot roots which is when your roots process faster and longer than your ends and it turns out in a different color about an inch from your scalp. And there you go. All right, I'll see you guys once I rinse it off and blow dry it like I said. I'll see you then. Oh, we're back. Okay, so Miss Miniquin is all done and all colored. As you can see, she is a multicolored diva now. And so let's talk about my findings here. Let's go over the blonde first. So as you can see, it's not a totally different color than what I started with. What they gave me was a natural golden blonde and that is exactly what this is. It's natural looking and it's golden and it's a level eight and it looks amazing and I'm very happy with it. I feel like it's slightly lighter than what I started with but it really has great vibrancy and really great depth to it. Then we move on to the darker section which is our dark brown color which is more of a cool toned brown. They did put a little bit of green neutralizer in there which will cancel out the red in her hair that was existing in her hair before. You're gonna get this kind of ash toned brown when there is a little bit of green in the formula so that is what happened and it is very ash toned in my opinion and it looks awesome. Really great depth, really great shine and the color looks really good. And in the back, this is the hardest color to see. We have a natural red tone in the back. Quite beautiful, doesn't scream out like I'm a redhead but it is a very beautiful red tone. If you're out in the sunlight, this would definitely show up a lot more. You can definitely see that red tint going on. And as you can see here on this diagram, there wasn't a ton of red in the color and therefore you're not gonna get a ton of red on the hair. It was about a third of the formula was red violet and then a little tiny fraction of the formula was red and then most of it was medium brown. So you're gonna get this really nice, beautiful medium brown with a tint of red and that's exactly what we got here. I feel like you can see it better on this camera than the up close I showed you because my white balance was a little off but in real life it's a beautiful natural red brown color and I'm very happy with everything that happened here. I'm impressed, dude. Woo, Miss Manny Queen, look amazing. Okay, so as you can see, the color came out literally brilliant, brilliant and I'm like 75% there. I am almost convinced this is the greatest idea ever. I honestly, I'm quite shook that I didn't hear about this Islam thing sooner. It's really great. Basically came to that conclusion that it's great and obviously my mannequin didn't have gray hair and it wasn't a human being and I just wanted one last assurance that this is going to work. I don't want to play games here. I don't want to recommend something and be absolutely mortified when a bunch of people try to buy the product and it doesn't work or it doesn't come in on time or the customer service is bad. No, honey, if I'm recommending something to you it's gonna be damn good and it's gonna work and I'm going to stand by that product and it's gonna be great for all of us. It's a win-win really. So I did one last thing. I call my mom and was like, listen babe, love you toots. You're gonna be my guinea pig today, okay? We're going to order you a color. We're gonna see how the quiz is done. We're gonna get your perfect match and my mom has 50% gray hair so she was a perfect candidate for this and so we wanted to give it a try. So we got her color in the mail and I called her the next day and we applied her color together and here is her first reaction to getting the box and opening it and using it on herself without me there and more will be explained in the video but let's head to that video and then I'll meet you back here. So mom, I was reached out to a company called Islam like you know, obviously we've talked about this a bit. I wanted you to basically be the guinea pig in this. Oh, okay, I have a different experience with that over the years. My mom lives in Florida so I cannot be there all the time to color her hair so when she's here, she gets her hair done and when she's away, she can't always do it and so it kind of gets grown out and like, you know, I don't want my mom to look bad like that's not cute on me. That's not cute for anybody. And obviously going to Islam is, you know, costs a bit of money and it's okay every once in a while but in between Islam visits to just do an easy root touch up, you know, can be done at home if the right color is used and the right application method is explained to you. So you got the box sent to you. Why don't we open it up? So you have, you know, a mix of gray hair and dark hair, right? It's like 50% gray. Or like, it's not like wildly gray but you definitely have that gray there. We don't like, you know, maximum coverage. Well on you, I personally like a little bit of translucent so that you can see like a little bit of gray shining through after your color. So it looks like you've kind of highlights going on. We're just going to retouch those roots. Obviously we're not doing the highlights today. It is supposed to be a little bit darker on her root because that is how she likes it and that's how I like it for her, which is more important. This is up to my brand-new idea. Let's follow the instructions. Why don't you open them up and get started. Beautiful. All portion perfectly. You don't have to do any thinking. Totally exist. So we're going to part it in the middle first and then paint that middle section just at your root area. You know how this is. You've got a lot of color down in your life. So my mom is going to finish up her hair. I'm going to get off camera because she needs to focus that she doesn't screw it up. We will reconvene in a bit once you're finished and we'll talk about the results. Alrighty. Let's go for it. Let's do it. It looks really good. Welcome to my channel. Shit. Wait, yeah. Put your head down. Hey, Esalon. I see you. Wait, that's pretty crazy how spot on it is. No, I'm kind of shocked with the results. It looks really good. Thanks for being my guinea pig. Happy birthday. For the hundredth time of my life. All right. Love you. Happy year five. Bye. So those are the results of my mom's hair. And again, I explained in the video, my mom doesn't like full coverage. I was so happy that the color was not formulated full coverage gray coverage. I do like that sparkling my mom's hair and I think it looks beautiful on her. I'm so happy with the way it blended. The way everything came out, it was literally the perfect tone. I usually do like a seven NA, seven neutral ash on her. And I think that's what exactly what they gave me after she flew about the quiz. And it's cool watching my mom who was not a colorist do her own hair and it come out really great. It was honestly, could not have been easier to use and was really cute that it was customized to her exact needs and it said that she needs color on it. Like, come on, that's pretty damn cute. Which brings us here today. Why I'm presenting you this brand deal. Islam has my vote. I approve of it. I think it's a great product. And listen, I'm not trying to sell you something. I'm just simply giving you the tools if you would like to color your hair at home, go for it. Using Islam would be my recommendation, but that is up to you, honey. Make the right decision or don't make the right decision. So I know that this is maybe your first time hearing about Islam and it was mine. After more research, I actually found this thing online. It said, okay, so apparently they're not very like niche. They are a pretty big company. Islam is the first indie beauty brand to win Allure's 2019 Best of Beauty Award for best home hair color. And they won it five times. I'm new to this. Hi. And apparently the whole world already knows that. And those are the reasons why I back the brands with every fully dedicated integration brand deal that I do. These are some of the thoughts that I have before actually accepting the offer and going ahead with it. I would never put my credibility as a hairdresser and as a hair influencer on the line to take some money from a brand and to talk about a product that I don't like. I just wanted to make everything clear. And I think people get a little bit confused when influencers take brand deal. So that is Islam. Thank you, Islam again for sponsoring today's video. I really appreciate it. And you have an amazing product. And I hope you enjoyed my video that I made for you. So have fun with your hair. Do a different color. Retouch the same color you have. Make yourself feel confident and good and strong and empowered and enjoy Islam. You can obviously click the link right below to get your own custom color from Islam today for $10. Do it. Get on it. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram and Twitter at bramundermyc. And that is all for me today. Thank you so much for watching. Don't forget to live your extra life. And I'll see you next time. Bye.