I’m Dana Whitfield, and TestOne started because I got tired of answering the same question at the shampoo bowl
I spent a decade telling clients the same three things every time they sat down, so I started writing them down instead.
Nineteen, a broom, and a salon on 15th Street
In 2009 I was nineteen and six months into a nursing program at a community college in Tulsa. I hated it. I hated the anatomy flashcards, I hated the clinical rotations, and I hated how certain I felt that I’d picked the wrong thing but had already told everyone I knew what my plan was. A friend told me Shear Envy, a salon on 15th Street, needed someone to sweep floors and wash heads on weekends. I took the job because it paid better than the cafeteria I was working at, not because I had some lifelong pull toward hair.
The first tool anyone put in my hand wasn’t scissors. It was a Diane boar-bristle brush, and the owner made me practice sectioning mannequin heads with it for two months before she’d let me touch a client. I remember being annoyed by that at the time, sectioning the same four rows over and over on a plastic head with a face that never changed expression. Looking back, it’s the only reason I didn’t ruin someone’s hair in my first month. I quit nursing that spring. I’ve been doing hair, one way or another, for sixteen years since.
The early mistakes were the kind that cost someone else, not me. In my second year I over-processed a regular’s hair trying to lift her too many levels in one sitting because I didn’t want to tell her it would take two appointments. She lost length she didn’t want to lose, and I lost her as a client for almost a year before she came back. That one sitting taught me more about patience than the two months with the mannequin did.
Who TestOne is for, and what it won’t do
This site is for women who see a stylist every eight to twelve weeks and need to manage everything in between on their own. That’s most of my former clients, and it’s most of the questions I got asked at the chair while I was rinsing color out of someone’s hair or trimming their bangs between full appointments. If you want to learn a full balayage technique or open your own salon, this isn’t your resource. There are better places for that, run by people who teach for a living. I write for the person standing in their own bathroom trying to figure out why their hair looks different from how it looked when they left my chair three weeks ago.
I won’t tell you a $12 drugstore serum works exactly like a $40 one when it doesn’t, and I won’t push a product just because a brand sent it to me for free. I turn those down more than people would guess, usually because the pitch makes a claim I can’t back up after testing it, or because the formula is nearly identical to something already sitting on my shelf under a different label. If something underperforms, I say so, even if I liked the packaging or the person who sent it was kind about it.
This also isn’t a site for trends that come and go in a single season. If a technique or product hasn’t held up across at least a few months of real use on real heads, I don’t write about it yet, no matter how much traffic it might bring in the short term.
How I check what I publish
Before anything goes up, I test it on my own hair or on a client who’s agreed to it, usually over at least two wash cycles. One wash tells you almost nothing. A product can feel great the day you use it and terrible three days later once your natural oil comes back, so I wait and watch before I write a word. I take photos in the same bathroom, under the same light, so I can compare results honestly instead of relying on memory, which is bad at judging shine and frizz consistently from one week to the next.
When I write about chemistry I don’t fully understand from experience alone, like how a specific bond-builder works, I call a chemist I know through a former coworker who now formulates for a small manufacturer in Dallas. I send her a draft paragraph, not just a question, because I want her to correct my wording, not just confirm my instinct. I’d rather ask her a question I feel dumb asking than publish something wrong with confidence, and more than once she’s caught me stating something backward that I was sure I had right.
If a post makes a claim that isn’t purely my own experience, I try to say where it came from, whether that’s her, a manufacturer’s technical sheet, or a study I read and understood well enough to summarize. If I’m not sure I understood it well enough, I leave it out rather than guess in print.
Why the why matters more than the steps
For years I gave clients steps without explanations because appointments run forty-five minutes and there’s no time to teach a mini class between the cut and the blowout. It didn’t work. People forgot the steps by the time they got home, and they’d redo the same mistake three weeks later, then come back and ask me why the same thing had happened again, a little frustrated, a little embarrassed.
So on TestOne I try to explain why a diffuser attachment reduces frizz and a bare dryer nozzle doesn’t, or why sleeping on a silk pillowcase actually changes friction and isn’t just a marketing line dreamed up to sell pillowcases. Once you understand the mechanism, you can adapt it when your bathroom, your water, or your hair type doesn’t match the article exactly, instead of following instructions written for someone else’s hair and wondering why they didn’t work for yours.
A typical post starts as a question I got asked at the chair, or one that shows up more than once in my inbox. I write down the mechanism first, in plain language, before I write the steps, because if I can’t explain why something works, I don’t trust myself to tell someone else to do it.
What’s still in my kit
I still work Tuesdays and Thursdays at a salon in Tulsa, mostly color correction and cuts for longtime clients who followed me from Shear Envy after it closed in 2016. Those two days look almost exactly like they did a decade ago: sectioning, foils, the same handful of trusted brushes and shears, and a lot of standing. The other five days I’m writing, testing, or answering messages from readers who found an old post and have a follow-up question that the post didn’t quite cover.
I don’t have a cosmetology instructor’s license and I’m not trying to replace your stylist. What I have is sixteen years of doing this on real heads, five days a week, and a habit of writing down what actually held up after the appointment ended, the wash cycles happened, and the client came back to tell me the truth about how it went.
Want to reach me?
I read every message, and I especially like questions about specific problems with your specific hair, not general ones. You can find me on Pinterest or send a direct message through the contact page.
Business and collaboration inquiries go to [email protected].
Wash day is easier than they tell you. — Dana