Inside Out Beauty: Kez Broad’s Holistic Approach to Hair and Health

Lori Esary: Wellness is a practice, not just a word.

Kelly Engelmann: Welcome to the Synergee Podcast, where myself, Kelly Engelmann and Lori Esarey shed light on powerful tools and topics that nourish your body, 

Lori Esarey: and most importantly, feed your soul!

Kelly Engelmann: Welcome Synergee listeners, we are so glad you guys are back listening to the Synergee podcast, where we believe we’re stronger together. We are so excited today because we have Kez Broad in studio. I cannot believe I got her here, but I’m so excited I did. And I know you will be too. 

Lori Esarey: So let me tell you a little bit about Kez. In 2010, husband and wife Gareth and Kez Broad moved to Mississippi and subsequently became the founders and management of Noggins Salon. Now a top 200 salon in the USA. Having traveled between America and Europe over the years in search of various Hairdressing techniques. They spent several years training with Tony and Guy salons in England, realizing the demand for further education in the beauty industry, they founded a curriculum, which combines the knowledge of the finest hairdressing education the industry has to offer, with a beta products to provide a more natural alternative for today’s modern clients. Stay tuned for today’s episode. 

We are so excited. I am here, Lori Esarey with Kelly Engelmann with Synergee today to talk to you, our valued listeners, about a topic that is near and dear to our, I was going to say hearts, but I’m going to say heads today. We’re going to talk about all things hair. We welcome both Kez as well as Kelly. I’m gonna to be talking with you guys and just about all of these things that we probably talk about with our hairdresser, maybe a little bit, or maybe we have some pressing questions that we’ve been thinking about our hair and we just didn’t know who to ask. So we’re going to have some great conversation. So Kelly, tell me a little bit about how do you know Kez and how did your relationship start? Give us some backstory here. 

Kelly Engelmann: Well, I’m going to give that back story, but I want to say I’m so excited that Kez is here, and I feel like this is almost a miracle that I got her in front of the mic, so we may keep her here all afternoon just talking about hair. Okay? So yeah, this is probably 10 years ago, maybe. I was really looking forward at what I was putting in my body and what I was putting on my body. I had just gone through a really deep dive into food sensitivities and had removed a lot of things from my diet and as a result of that dropped a lot of body fat and had lost some hair. My hair was shedding. And so I was like and I was starting to see some grays peek through that I was not happy about. And I didn’t really want to put synthetic hair color on my hair. And I was just like, where do I go? So I had a patient come into me and tell me all about Noggins. And so I went in seeking like the best. I wanted to tiptoe into this part of my life, a little cleaner than the average person. And I was just so privileged to have met Kez during that journey. So welcome. 

Kez Broad: Thank you. 

Kelly Engelmann: And in meeting Kez, we realized quickly that we were, our relationship was going to be bi directional. Right? 

Kez Broad: Yes. 

Kelly Engelmann: So, Kez, tell us a little bit about your story. How you, what do you remember about our meeting and kind of how it progressed from there? 

Kez Broad: When Kelly came in and she let us know that she worked on shedding with a couple different treatments at her facility. It was really interesting because shedding is something that everyone experiences normally at some part of their life that is exacerbated more than another time. And she invited us out to her practice to play with her toys. She had a little machine that magnified the scalp that you could look at, what the quality of the hair is in a thin spot or a bald spot. We also talked about PRP and how that worked and how the platelet rich plasma actually acted like a stimulator to wake up those sleepy follicles and get them going again. And once we had completed talking about that, we were talking about more things that she does at her clinic and I said to her, I think I need to be here. That’s what kind of happens.

Lori Esarey: Yeah. 

Kez Broad: Kind of happens. Doesn’t it? 

Lori Esarey: Yes. Yeah. We get intrigued about it. And I love what you said about that she shared her toys, because it is, it’s like a wellness haven when you go there and it’s fun to get excited about those gadgets and those tools to help us be healthier.

Kez Broad: Absolutely. And just. really was something that I knew existed in my industry, but it’s not something that hairdressers learn in school or we don’t have access usually to a friend that has that kind of equipment to play with. So it’s kind of one of those things where There’s a huge disconnect between doctor and hairdresser, and really those two things belong together.

Lori Esarey: So Noggins is your salon name, is that correct? 

Kez Broad: Yes

Lori Esarey: because Noggins, we say is head, right? Use your noggins? 

Kez Broad: Yes. 

Lori Esarey: Yeah. So when Kelly said it earlier, I’m like, I think I need to go back and say, Noggins is the name of your salon. Where did you come up with that? That’s super cute. Obviously, we know it is our head, but that’s super cute.

Kez Broad: I cannot take credit for that. I moved to the U. S. 15 years ago from England. I don’t come with the accent because I’m Canadian raised. And Noggins was a salon that was failing and I got into agreement with the owner that I would flip it. In exchange for getting them out of the red and into the black, they would give me ownership of the salon. Which was a big deal, because I had no capital, no American credit, and all of a sudden I owned something. Which is how the American life begins. So it’s a huge blessing. 

Lori Esarey: What a phenomenal story. That is amazing. And now you have the ability to touch lives, obviously not only touching Kelly’s lives, but together, as you said, that relationship between practitioner and you as an expert in your field has the ability to touch so many others. I would love to dig in a little bit to what you said about shedding. One of the things we see commonly in functional medicine is hair loss, and the question we often get is, is the amount of hair loss I have normal or not? How do we know? 

Kez Broad: So the average hair loss should be 80 to 120 hairs a day. And normally we don’t see that happen if it’s a healthy amount of hair loss. You may see a hair or two on your shirt, a hair or two in your brush, or a hair or two in the shower. It’s when you’re flinging a wad of hair across your shower door. It’s when you’re cleaning out the entire brush every time that you’re, brushing your hair while it’s wet, that’s your body’s check engine light. Something here is awry. And it is the science experiment that has so many variables like most medical things. We have things that affect the hair topically and things that affect the hair internally. And because there are so many variables, just like any experiment or any medical treatment, it can be hard to narrow down, quickly.

And so, from my perspective, if I do everything I know to your topical hair health, most of my customers, like 80, 90%, I’ll say before COVID. 80 90% before COVID, they would live happily ever after and I was their magic unicorn hair fairy. And the other 10 15% I would send to Kelly to check in on vitamins, minerals, hormones, absorption, thyroid, and all the other things I can’t think of off the top of my head right this second. And together we treated a lot of people. Since COVID, literally everyone, every age, including babies. We just have a whole new set of rules. I feel like I’m having everybody in my chair ask me about shedding. And truly what’s happened since COVID is, your body needs nutrients. And when there’s a problem, like a virus, your more vital organs are going to take that nutrients to keep you alive. Your immune system needs more. And so it doesn’t leave a lot of ingredients left for your body to make hair. And during that time your hair goes into a dormant phase where it stops growing. After the dormant phase it goes into a shedding phase. And after the shedding phase, it starts to regrow. However, for some reason since COVID, we’ve noticed that the life cycle, life cycle being how long a hair grows before it sheds and becomes a new hair, has stunted. And I’m really seeing it very badly in babies who went through their formative years during COVID. It’s been really, really tough to get these babies out of this poor life cycle. So again, that’s where Kelly comes in, where she can look at do you have enough ingredients to make hair? Has your life cycle been affected? And what do we need to do to boost that and get your body out of that? hoarding of nutrients to the immune system and the vital organs. 

Kelly Engelmann: Yeah. So that’s where functional medicine comes in, right? 

Kez Broad: Yeah. 

Kelly Engelmann: So when I think about hair loss and hair shedding and to Kez’s point, rules have changed in the last three years, but we oftentimes think about blood flow. Are we getting enough circulation to the scalp? So I’m going to give you a prescription right now, to have your spouse massage your head every night. 

Kez Broad: Nice. 

Kelly Engelmann: Okay. That’s the prescription, right? That shouldn’t be hard to accomplish. It’s very relaxing, brings blood flow to the scalp, and we need the blood flow to deliver the nutrients, right? But then we have to have the nutrients, right? So are we eating what we need to be eating? And studies show us actually that the Mediterranean diet has been the most studied for hair loss and hair regrowth. And really it’s about variety. In the Mediterranean diet, there’s rich, it’s rich in fats, it’s rich in proteins, and it’s rich in fruits and vegetables. So we need all of those complements to grow really good hair. But guys, just because we’re eating it does not mean we’re absorbing it. So if we can absorb it, if there are some digestive issues going on, then perhaps we’re not absorbing the things that we could be getting. And to Kez’s point, and if the immune system is taxed out, the immune system is taking a lot of those nutrients, to rebalance, 

Lori Esarey: right ? So Kelly, what kind of testing are you performing in your clinic to really get to the underlying root cause of the hair loss? 

Kelly Engelmann: Yeah. So Kez mentioned earlier, the dermascope. So we basically have this microscope that we can look at the follicle and see what does that follicle look like? Are those follicles spaced in a way that is a healthy pattern or is there sparsity in those follicles? Does that follicle have blood flow? You can see micro vessels under the scalp and is it getting good blood flow? Is there shadowing of a hormone called DHT? So dihydrotestosterone can cause Shrinkage of that follicle, so when you’re growing new hair, you’re growing thinner hair with spear hair, and it’s not as luscious as it needs to look. So that’s part of it we want to look at that follicle and see what’s going on. The other part is hormones. We want to look at those hormones, what are those hormones telling us? Are we cortisol dominant? Are we lacking in thyroid hormone? What’s going on in the hormone cascade? There’s such an interplay between your sex hormones, your stress hormones, and your thyroid hormones. And you really need to look at all of those together. And then gut health. Right? What’s the gut doing? Do we have an imbalance in bacteria and viruses and parasites, and yeast going on in the gut microbone? And then oftentimes we’ll do nutrient panels. At a minimum for nutrition, I’ll do ferritin and B12 and of course vitamin D. But oftentimes we will look at micronutrients as well. 

Lori Esarey: So it’s a combination of a testing and looking at the hair follicle, as you said, and understanding that the hair follicle is very nutrient needy. And I think Kez, that’s what you were mentioning too, and then doing the diagnostic testing. 

Kez Broad: So at my salon, we chose to go with Aveda as our brand. And going off of what Kelly said about how you need this variety of nutrients. So a phenomenon that happens with people’s hair products is they may find something that works really, really well. And six to eight weeks later, it’s not having that same result that it was and what you’re experiencing is what you were using had one specific nutrient in it that your hair needed, but it didn’t have all the nutrients that your hair needed. So the nutrient that specific product had, got depleted so now you have the same issue you started with, but in another category. 

So Aveda is my favorite because, they have single nutrient products, and by that I mean there is one protein based shampoo and conditioner, a moisture based shampoo and conditioner, a bond repair shampoo and conditioner, which is for things like breakage. They also, Kelly had mentioned this DHT hormone. They have a hormone removing shampoo and that’s exactly what it does. DHT is a thick waxy hormone that sits on top of the scalp. It can remove it. So we teach our clients that you don’t need one shampoo and conditioner. You need three. Their husbands love us for that. And that you rotate them equally. And everyone will always get a favorite. And I have to threaten lives and say, I know that you really like the one in the pink bottle, but the other two will get jealous. They need to be rotated. And just teaching people. And, when things go wrong at work, it’s normally that, hairdresser client breakdown, just like Kelly will have a practitioner patient breakdown, where she has to remind us, well, how’s your diet going? They’re whining about something. Are you remembering to take your supplements? I’m doing the same job over here on the hair. Do we still have all three conditioners? Well, no, kids. I ran out of two six months ago, and I’ve just been using the protein one. Well, you haven’t used moisture for six months. So Let’s go back to doing that. And you’ll see your hair snap back and it always does. So it’s really cool when you get that variety going inside and outside, just how quickly the hair can heal as the same thing with the body. You get it the right nutrients and it starts to heal itself. 

Lori Esarey: So you touched Kez on something I wanted to dig a little bit deeper into, which is. Apparently, your journey, your journey with your own health that has obviously impacted what you do. So tell us about your journey in healing yourself and how that impacts you at your work and your work.

Kez Broad: Yeah. So like I said, I was in Kelly’s clinic and I was 90 pounds heavier than I am now and very inflamed, had some chronic issues. And this new friend of mine just seemed to do a lot of that type of work, whereas my traditional doctor told me that I needed to eat less and exercise more, and that having a baby would sort my hormones out. That was very terrible advice if I ever did hear it. The truth was I had gained that 90 pounds in 18 months after moving to America. And I didn’t move to America and like, start eating everything in sight. In fact, we didn’t make very much money in the beginning because hairdressers only make money when they do hair and didn’t have clients yet. So calorically, it really wasn’t a huge change from what I was eating in the UK. But Kelly explained to me at that early time that the quality of the food, what chemicals are used when the food is grown on U. S. soil. To my very old, very British genetics, my body didn’t understand it as a food source. And my immune system kicked in and attacked gluten in particular. Which we now know is grown covered in Roundup. So, my very old genes don’t know what Roundup is, and didn’t want to process that as a food. And when you can’t get nutrients from your food, your body decides to store what you eat as fat, thinking that you’re starving. And I think that’s pretty common with being overweight to be malnutritioned, which everybody giggles at when you’re obviously fluffy.

Kelly Engelmann: Yes, undernourished. So, as I remember it, Kez, I remember that you had already pulled gluten from your diet before you saw me as a patient, and you had already started doing yoga, and you were gaining. 

Kez Broad: Yes. 

Kelly Engelmann: And we did Cyrex Array 4 for you to look at foods that cross react to gluten and you had a corn sensitivity. And you had changed from eating gluten to corn products, right? 

Kez Broad: Still a very processed diet. 

Kelly Engelmann: But that’s what you knew to do, right? That was a logical step. You just didn’t know that your immune system was also heavily reactive to corn. 

Kez Broad: And I didn’t know that you needed to heal your gut. I just thought it would magically, heal itself through the absence, but there’s so much more that was involved to getting that true healing. 

Lori Esarey: Such a powerful story. And so, and now you have the ability to kind of turn that around. You have a captive audience, right? When you’re doing their hair. So how does your story help women feel seen and heard? Because that’s what happened with you. You were seen and heard and someone understood perspective and laid it out in a way that you could apply it differently. And apparently it worked. Right. So. How does that transition to your practice there at the salon? 

Kez Broad: That happened pretty organically. If you start showing up to work, a dress size, smaller every time that they come in for their six week appointment, they’re going to be like, all right, sister, what’s going on? Because I need to drink your Kool Aid. And so, the more that people came back, the more we would talk about it organically because they wouldn’t let me not talk about it. And I went through profound changes with my skin and my hair and my nails as those nutrients started to be able to absorb in my body. And it has not gone unnoticed. What’s so fun is, it’s been, I want to say, 10, 11 years since the beginning of that journey. And even though, at a very good point on that journey, people are saying, Oh, wow, you’re 40 now and you don’t have a bunch of wrinkles. What face cream do you use? It’s like, Kelly Engelmann is my face cream. Go look at your labs, drink some water, look at what’s making you inflamed. That clarity that you see in mine, 40 year old skin is diet and supplement related. Not that skincare is not important, but there’s no face cream out there that’s going to make you look better if the insides aren’t doing well. And the same is true about hair care. No amount of seeing Kelly and doing all the right things can supersede your topical toxicity. That’s something that has to go hand in hand. 

Lori Esarey: So I think what you’re saying, obviously not just your skin is a testament to how you’re nourishing your body, but your hair is absolutely a testament to that too. What constitutes a healthy head of hair? I just have to know. 

Kez Broad: So when I have a new customer in and we’re really trying to troubleshoot the main things that are bothering them, one of the first things that I’ll ask them is if they’re shedding. Typically, if they’re shedding, there are things like silicone, dimethicone, trimethicone, acrylates, and petroleum in the products that they’re using. These are types of coatings that are in typical hair products. They’re in there to make the hair shiny and to make the hair detangle easily. Unfortunately, as a result, one of the side effects is those coatings get stuck in the pores of the scalp, clogging the pore and then causing the hair to shed. On the hair shaft itself, it kind of acts like a sheath of plastic on the outside of the hair shaft. And nothing can get inside of the hair. So if you have sealed the outside of your hair, you could use the most expensive conditioner in the world, and it’ll sit on top of the hair rather than getting inside of the hair. So you need your hair to be porous and unsealed in order for it to receive nutrients from the outside in.

There’s also a part of the hair called the polypeptide chain, which is in the center of the hair. It breaks down due to color highlights, and heat damage. And there’s a product that we use that helps to fill the dings, if you will, in the polypeptide chain. Now, the polypeptide chain is what gets nutrients from the food that you eat, and the supplements that you take down through the center shaft of the hair. And Kelly and I kind of accidentally discovered this together because that was not in my cosmetology book in hair school. But I would send people to Kelly and some mystery things about their hair would change. I had one client who had Uncombable hair syndrome. Google it. It’s hilarious. Uncombable hair syndrome is exactly like it sounds. You cannot get a comb through it. And she was doing everything right to her hair topically. And it made no sense that this hair was still in terrible condition. But she became Kelly’s patient and Kelly was able to identify that she had some deficiencies. And by the very next haircut, four weeks later, the hair was comable. And so, Kelly and I had to admit to each other that nutrients gets from your scalp all the way down to the tip, not just as it’s growing out, but It can travel through the hair.

Kelly Engelmann: And we’ve always been taught that hair is dead, right? It’s not live, right? And so Lori and I when we would do PRP would always be amazed at how the hair texture changed. It got beautiful and shiny, and we always would talk about what it didn’t make sense, like we just did the PRP two days later my hair looks amazing. How? And I think that’s how, like, we’re getting that nutrition. 

Kez Broad: It’s that polypeptide change. Now, that conversation between Kelly and I was a decade ago. The product that deals with that is only a year old. So the industry is catching up and going, Oh, what’s this little doodad for? And has finally found a way to support it. And that’s been such a game changer because If I can keep the polypeptide chain stronger, I can heal people’s hair quicker if I’m able to heal it both from the inside and the outside, but still heavily dependent on getting them that information that they need about how their internal health is doing and what they need to support that.

Kelly Engelmann: And we have to just be honest. Our hair, is so important, especially for females, when I remember back when I was losing my hair, I just felt so out of control. Like I was like, Okay, I’ve always had thick, luscious hair. What is this going to say about me if I don’t? And so I have such compassion for these women that are coming in and they’re struggling with hair loss. Because I know what that feels like, number one, but also I know what can be done about it. Like, I know it’s fixable. I always get so excited when I see their hair growing. When I see new follicles and see that hair coming back, I’m just always so excited. 

Lori Esarey: So, Kez, one of the things you mentioned a few minutes ago was what you saw clinically as you were working with your customers and Kelly, you too, what we see with our patients and, but what hasn’t been documented. In the research, you were saying how a product was just coming out. I can’t tell you how important that is. And I commend both of you for looking and really digging into and paying attention to those cues and clues and trying to connect those dots because it does take research where they say 10 to 15 years, right? To catch up to clinical practice. And it takes us being attentive to that. What other things? I mean, are there some other things or we have to save that one for later of like these little secrets? Because that was a really good one. Kelly and I, we did. We kept saying. What is this like two days later, as Kelly said, my hair would be amazing. It’d be same product, same food, nothing else changed. I had PRP and my texture of my hair was amazing. So any other secrets, any other things that you guys are picking up on out there that you need to share with me? 

Kez Broad: I want to touch on you talking about how, what happens in clinics and what catches up as often has a big time lapse. Hair products are not drugs. Very rarely does a hair product get a clinical trial. And the Aveda line that I use spent a lot of money clinical trialing our DHT removing anti shedding shampoo. If they were to clinical trial every single product that they make to make a bold claim, they would be bankrupt. And so the medical industry deals with that, too. And the laws about what you can say about a drug or a supplement are oftentimes back practitioners into a corner and hairdressers into a corner. And so, it is through the development of these relationships of pulling Kelly’s medical world into my hair world and us just making observations and doing what we know at the time and seeing what patterns arise that really help us to help people before there’s a really good explanation for that. And there’s nothing like your own personal health journey, like what I went through and all the things that were happening with my hair from shedding to breakage and crumbling, watching that reverse and how quickly that reversed and being able to tell my clients like hey, I know you’re seeing my waist length hair right now, but there was a time when it wouldn’t grow past a certain length. And there was a time when the front of my hair would break before it hit my eyebrows. It is the check engine light. It’s the body going, Hey, there’s a problem. But it’s just so cool to me how those things we come to sometimes make peace with can be reversed. Because we accept sometimes that we’re stuck with that. And there are people and practitioners that know otherwise, and it’s just so neat. 

Lori Esarey: Yeah. What medications, Kelly, I want to ask this because I know a lot of our listeners, COVID was definitely a big insult, if you will, to hair, right? Driving a lot of hair loss, we saw it. But what either medical conditions, and I know we hit on that a little bit, but what medications, because I believe there are other medications that patients are on too that can lead to hair loss. Can you name a few of those or talk about those? 

Kelly Engelmann: And I’m just going to speak strictly from experience on this. I haven’t seen any research to support this statement, but what I see by and far is all of the PPI use. So Nexium and Prolosec, anything that decreases stomach acid and prevents the absorption of proteins and the production of B12. Destroys the hair over time. Those medications were put out to be used for two weeks at a time and for episodic reflux, not to be lived on for months and years and years. And so I see that be a common thread to not just hair challenges, but also intestinal dysbiosis and bone loss even from the use of those medications. So that’s one that if there’s anything that you can do to get off of that medication, working with your provider that you’re seeing, I think that would be worth pursuing. There’s a reason you’re having those symptoms that require that medication. Let’s look for the root cause of those symptoms. Yeah.

Lori Esarey: Yeah. And so how fast does hair actually grow? Cause like, what do you see and the way, what would be normal for you to watch for hair growth? 

Kez Broad: I just wanted to touch on what Kelly just talked about with medication before we go there. 

Lori Esarey: Sure. Absolutely. 

Kez Broad: I’ve had a lot of clients share with me what medications they’re on because they have concerns about their hair afterwards. Some really shocking medications have been treatments for migraines actually causing something called hair pitting, which makes it look like an extreme pothole case, under a microscope and causes a lot of breakage. Things like methotrexate, all the autoimmune drugs, they really greatly change the texture of the hair.

Kelly Engelmann: So that blocks the folate cycle. So that goes back to nutrition as well. 

Kez Broad: And I wanted to mention that the clinical trial shampoo by Aveda actually removes DHT, but it also removes medical waste. And so everything that goes into your body actually, excretes out of the pores as well. We think of excretion as being your BMs, however, it is coming out of the pores too. So, whether it’s a cancer patient on chemotherapy, or someone’s on a migraine drug, or someone’s on an autoimmune drug, that type of remover is really great. And the clients that have spoken to me, in particular about autoimmune issues and headaches, I share with them that part of my story where I had chronic headaches. And rather than get on a medication, Kelly was able to identify what my inflammatory triggers were, remove those from me, help me heal my gut. And then the headaches went away. And for me, that’s a much better victory than taking a migraine medication for the rest of my life. 

Kelly Engelmann: Absolutely. 

Lori Esarey: Absolutely. Antihypertensives as what I have seen. So blood pressure medications are one of those classes of drugs that I have seen hair loss into and perhaps that’s my neck of the woods and the average age clientele that I am treating, but I see a lot of hair loss from that. And then we can’t really underestimate adrenals and I’ll go back to that thyroid, adrenals, adrenals, and stress. And just what that does to the body to causing hair loss. I’m sure you all see that. 

Kez Broad: Yes, 

Kelly Engelmann: for sure. 

Kez Broad: And as far as how fast hair should grow, it depends what age you are. And that, I don’t just mean chronological age, I mean like how your cells are doing. So a cool thing Kelly said to me years ago was stop thinking of aging as linear. Aging is your cells turning over in worse condition and her goal with me was to get them to turn over in the same or better condition and we kind of kept on track with that. So as I got into my mid 30s, my hair just wouldn’t get past a certain length, and then after Kelly’s treatment, it can now get as long as I desire it to be. And really what’s happened is just teaching me that the life cycle of my hair was affected by what was happening in my internal. But, if your average person of, let’s just say, ages 15 to 50, you’re looking at a half an inch a month, but there are so very many variables that affect that and COVID of course, being the worst variable I’ve ever seen in my 26 years of doing hairdressing. A lot of people got stuck in that dormant. Stage and it’s hard taking them out of it. 

Kelly Engelmann: Absolutely. So how often should we get a haircut? You taught me this. So, 

Kez Broad: so again, a lot of variables here. So my hair is waist length. It’s naturally curly. It’s very coarse. It’s very thick and I have a little bit of gray. And so at my length of hair, I cut my hair every three weeks because in three weeks, hair that coarse will get a tiny little split end at the very, very bottom. If I leave it there, what will happen is unraveling. So if you look at hair under a microscope, it looks like a rope with a roof on it. And the roof shingles fall off, which caused the rope to start to fray. That’s your split end. And then the rope can unravel. So if I want to keep this hair this long, I have to be very, very diligent. So each person’s hair is assessed when they come in to me for the first time. And I let them know, if you want to grow your length, you need to come in X amount of weeks. If you want to maintain your length, X amount of weeks. And if you don’t mind having a good inch cut off each time, X amount of weeks. So we just kind of help the clients guide to what their goals are. And making sure that they’re not growing and breaking at the same rate. I’ve had a couple people sit in my chair that are just like, I don’t want to get a haircut. I want it to grow long. And they don’t get a haircut for a year. They’re refusing to follow Dr. Kez’s orders. And what ends up happening is that year later, their hair is shorter than when it was when they left. And that phenomenon is poor life cycle, tailored with the growth to breakage ratio being out of wrack.

Lori Esarey: So what I hear you saying is if you want your hair to grow, you’ve got to cut, you’ve got to trim, and the frequency of that really is due to or is driven by the type of hair you have, right? 

Kez Broad: Yes. And the other variables. 

Lori Esarey: Yeah. Which are a lot. A lot of variables. 

Kez Broad: Yes. I see Kelly smiling over there.

Lori Esarey: Well, I’m smiling because I’m thinking, okay, how can I say that Kez is already booked up? No one needs to schedule with her anymore. 

Kez Broad: That’s just selfish, Kelly. 

Kelly Engelmann: I know we just told you to get your hair cut every three weeks, but forget that.

Lori Esarey: What she’s really saying is she loves you, Kez, and she really, although she would love to share you, she really needs to make sure that you’ve got appointments for her. 

Kelly Engelmann: I’m very jealous. I’m very jealous. 

Kez Broad: There’s always after hours. 

Kelly Engelmann: Okay. Haha. 

Lori Esarey: So, Kez, you were talking earlier about products and every time Kelly and I travel, there’s this product in a green little bottle that if she’s running low on that, she panics.

Kez Broad: She should. 

Lori Esarey: So I think she should, okay. I was thinking that because. I think it’s for heat damage, and I want to understand better, because I have curly hair, I heard you say it, naturally I have curly hair, and I want to straighten it all the time, what does heat do to the hair, and how can we stop that damage?

Kez Broad: So I’m going to go a little bit further into how your hair works to explain that. So every time your hair is wet, your disulfide and cysteine bonds that are inside of your hair break, and every time it’s dry, they reform. Those disulfide and cysteine bonds are susceptible to wet and dry and hot and cold. So you’re able to reform your hair into different shapes because you’re manipulating those bonds. So the cuticle, which is the outer layer of your hair, is the one that takes all of the beading during that trying to manipulate the shape of your bonds. And so, especially if your hair and scalp are detoxed and there’s no coating on there, you have to be really diligent with your heat protection. Because that hair is now hair instead of hair covered in a sealant. So, we are spraying that to protect the outside cuticle. The cuticle is what’s protecting the rope that we talked about that’s underneath. If we are suddenly ripping our roof shingles off of the roof of our hair house more moisture can get into the hair. When we walk around in our humid weather here in the south, if we don’t have lots of shingles on the roof, we get frizzy really quickly. And so, that heat protection is going to make sure that that hair is sealed, but not by using the tarmac of hair products. It’s sealed in protecting it from the heat while closing the cuticle organically, instead of chemically.

Lori Esarey: So you should panic Kelly, now I should too when I run low in that product. Yes. So I do have curly hair. Is it bad to straighten it? As often as I probably do? I straighten it like five days a week. 

Kez Broad: So the hair and scalp, if they’re detoxed and the hair is porous and you’re rotating through your conditioners and you’re using heat protection, we have found that people can have a pretty good experience with it. But I would be questioning you if you were my client on what’s going on with your haircut that’s causing you to have to restyle it all the time. Because a really good shapely haircut, you should be able to sleep on and still look cute when you wake up. So I’d be looking into some other variables into how’s your shape doing in the haircut? Is there any unraveling? Are we missing any cuticle layers that we could be sealing to make sure that you’re not constantly having to redo that. So a big part of my job is helping to guide people to haircuts that can maximize how thick their hair looks. My hair is gigantanormous if it’s not super long. If I cut it to my chin, I wouldn’t fit through the front door of this house. And so picking the right shape for your texture, the white, right weight distribution, checking in on the hair health and the scalp health, they all come together to make that happen. And I did have shorter hair at one time and I was flattering it all the time before the good tech came out and it really degraded the quality of my hair. So picking a different hairstyle that helps to add weight where needed was good. 

My friend Kelly also has very coarse, very thick hair, and we’ve tried some different hairstyles over the last decade, and we seem to have landed you with a little bit more length as well for the very same reason. 

Kelly Engelmann: Exactly. Yes. But I love my products. And I love my straightener. I’m trying to find a way to go to Europe. 

Lori Esarey: Yeah. Well as I listened to you Kez, first of all, your knowledge is incredible. I could listen to you for hours. Just I’m a science y person and I can only imagine, like the people that are listening to this, it’s just incredible that it really is. It’s far more than just a haircut, far more than just a color. It’s a lot, you’re assessing a lot and you’re conversating a lot, it sounds like with your client in the chair about nutrition and nourishment of that too, so hats off to you. I think the experience that you’re creating obviously is so amazing. That’s why you are so booked, which is fantastic, right, Kelly? 

Kelly Engelmann: Yes. The good and the bad. It is, it is fantastic and she has an incredible team too, there are occasions when I cannot be graced with the chair of Kez because of poor scheduling on my part and I wind up in someone else’s chair and I’ll be honest, they’re all phenomenal and it’s because you’re training them. I mean, they have an intensive internship that they go through to even have a chair in your salon, so I’m always super confident that I’m in the right place if I have to sit in another chair. However, Kez and I have such incredible conversations like I can’t miss my Kez fix in just learning all of this hair knowledge and how I can be helping my patients better. She’s always giving me insight too and what my patients are coming back saying to her, which gives me insight as to what I need to be talking to them about on their next visit, so there’s a lot of conversation that happens. Broadly speaking with patients just on topics like what are patients in general experiencing? What could we be doing better in functional medicine in the way that we communicate with our patients? And motivate them to make the changes that they need if they’re motivated by their hair great if that makes them eat more greens great Let’s have the conversation, because hair is such an important part of the female experience and i’m not leaving the guys out, too but for us girls, I know what that feels like.

Kez Broad: Absolutely. 

Lori Esarey: Yeah, we definitely are stronger together. And just going back to that concept, it’s using all of our expertise and having somewhat of a mind share collaborative and sharing experiences. I hope we have some time to ask some product questions because I have some product questions. Do we have some time to do that?

Kelly Engelmann: Yeah, let’s do it. 

Lori Esarey: Awesome. So, I keep hearing you talk about Aveda and I have experience in years past with Aveda and thanks to Kelly, I have had the ability to experience more of Aveda product because she shares with me, which is great. May not be the best product for me so Kez I might have to have come and get a consultation when I’m in Mississippi next time. But you hit on a topic earlier Kez about the science and the testing and just cleanliness and things like that, a product, how do we, if we don’t have access to you, Kez, how do you recommend the average consumer verify your check product? how would you, like, what tips would you give the general consumer for hair care products?

Kez Broad: That’s a really good question. So, I have Kelly Englemann in my life, but I also had a chemical engineer father to ask a lot of questions, too. So I had an unfair advantage in getting sciency with hair. And unfortunately, around the country, it’s been really hard for my clients that move away or for people that are far away to be able to have those conversations with their hairdresser. If I can brag for a second, in Ridgeland Mississippi, I have the largest Aveda account in the country, with only seven hairstylists, so that’s a pretty small shop with a very, very big account. And it comes through this personal experience that I had and continuously trying to troubleshoot this. So really and truly we have some basics like use a silicone removing shampoo, like rosemary mint by Aveda and then rotate the three main food sources through your conditioner, so that can get most people that can’t get their hair in my hands so far. And just like with Kelly, if you do a detox diet, it’s going to get you so far, but sometimes there’s mystery variables. And we need to look just a little bit further. So we have very similar jobs where there’s some good advice, but, if Kelly says eat salad for a week and then my Cyrex lab comes back that I have a arugula allergy, then I would have been still inflamed, and so. Test not guess is what she’s always said and I was able to develop a test to test people’s hair and what happens during that test is I use a special shampoo that helps to peel back some of the coatings. And then I put a protein and a moisturizer on the hair and the hair begins to react. So if there’s coatings present, it doesn’t absorb into the hair. And through experience, I know what it feels like when something sits on top of rather than absorbs into. And then we time this absorption process and we’re able to tell, when the hair really grabs for something quickly it’s very malnourished in that. And when it grabs slowly and steadily, that level is a little bit better. So we’re able to kind of guide people as to where their hair is, it’s weakest and how we can improve it. I remember when Kelly was first treating me, I had what I described to her as a euphoric high, when taking my supplements for the first couple weeks. And I’m texting her, I’m like, Kelly, I’m on the way to work. I’m laughing for no reason and colors are very bright. She’s like, you’re fine, you’re just finally absorbing nutrients. It will balance out and I’m like freaking out. I gotta go do some hair in a minute and I’m just like, having a moment and it’s hair and the body in general they behave the same way when it finally gets what it’s looking for. It gets real excited about it so the hair is a little more alive than we initially 

Kelly Engelmann: gave it credit for, right? 

Kez Broad: And we’re just scratching the surface of this phenomenon and through marrying wellness and hairdressing together and having those conversations, which normally aren’t a collaboration, we’re really getting somewhere with understanding. And it’s exciting to share that with people because when people come in the chair and they’re there just for a haircut and you say, Hey, have you ever been to an organic salon before? And you tell them what you do and why, and that you’re going to test their hair for free today. This wave of relief comes over their face like, Oh my God, this person’s going to help me with this.

Kelly Engelmann: I love, I mean, honestly, I do get so excited. We have a mutual person that we see, and I got to see her last week, and her initial visit with me was because of hair, and she’s been with me two years, and it’s like she has reversed her age, she’s in her 60s, and she looks like she’s in her 40s now. Like she doesn’t have, 50 year old hair, she’s got beautiful hair now and she’s walking straighter and it’s just, I love it. I love being able to see that. I’m sure you do too when they come beeping, beeping in the salon. 

Kez Broad: The part of me that enjoys helping me loves it, but the selfish part as a business woman loves it too because when somebody suddenly looks better, everybody wants to know. And so in, in every way, everybody’s winning here from business to helping people and it’s a lot of fun what we do. 

Lori Esarey: It sure is. And I did have to ask this because in supplements, oftentimes we get the question about where to buy. There are a lot of people are clicking and shopping on Amazon. And what we have found in the supplement industry is that there’s a lot of counterfeiting going on with products. So just asking if a person is looking for a beta product. How do they buy? Is Amazon safe? Is it truly Aveda? Even though they’re selling Aveda, do you go like, so what do you recommend? 

Kez Broad: So Aveda is naturally derived and the preservative in Aveda is essential oil. Essential oils are very, very good at being able to preserve products. Oftentimes when things pop up on Amazon or in a drugstore, you’re looking at old product or diluted product. So, we can’t really guarantee the results or the date that it was made at that time. And if we’re talking this big game, like you’re going to see some changes if you alternate these products the way that we say that you should, it may not be able to penetrate the hair properly if it’s lost its pH. Because essentially, shampoos and conditioners have pHs designed to open the hair and deliver nutrients and then the pH changes and closes the hair. And so, if the pH has gone off in the bottle, it may not open it, and it may just leave the nutrients on the top, where it will do nothing. And that’s a huge problem. So, we don’t even keep old stock. We like to keep our stock constantly moving and coming directly from the Aveda headquarters. 

Lori Esarey: So people wanting to order, can they order through you? Do you have a store? Like, how does that work if they want to buy it? 

Kez Broad: Yeah, you can go to the Noggins Organic Salon website and there’s a shop Aveda button, which takes you to the big Aveda link. And you can also buy Aveda on the official Aveda website. 

Lori Esarey: Excellent. So the Noggins website is what? 

Kez Broad: Nogginsorganicsalon.com. 

Lori Esarey: Perfect. Well, I want to say thank you so much for your time today. I truly am very number one, eye opening. I have not had the experience that Kelly has had being able to come in and sit with you and be in your chair. I look forward to the opportunity of that for sure, but today has been very informative and I do, I thank you so much for your contributions. To the health industry and helping women, I’m sure men to look and feel their very best and thank you for your relationship with Kelly because of that, I have learned so much to and thank you for taking the time out on this afternoon to give us your wealth of knowledge. I really appreciate that you’ve done that. 

Kez Broad: Thank you for having me.

Lori Esarey: Thanks so much for listening to today’s episode. You can find more information about Synergee at Synergee for Life. That’s S Y N E R G E E the number four life. com 

Kelly Engelmann: and then Synergee Connect is our Facebook. And then please make sure to follow us on your favorite podcast app so that you make sure you get future notifications of episodes.

Lori Esarey: The purpose of our Synergee podcast is to educate. It does not constitute medical advice. By listening to this podcast, you agree not to use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition in either yourself or others, including, but not limited to, patients that you are treating. Please consult your own physician for any medical issues you may be having.

Enhanced Wellness Living is Mississippi’s premier Functional Medicine Wellness Clinic!  We are proud to serve all of Mississippi including Ridgeland, Jackson, Madison, Rankin, Byram, Hernando, Starkville, Flowood, Bolton, Hinds, Brandon, Oxford, Canton, Olive Branch, Clinton, Vicksburg, and more!  Not in Mississippi?  We have patients who travel from Texas, Alabama,  Louisiana, Tennessee, Georgia, Arkansas, and more for these life changing procedures!