Welcome to All About Hair with Danise...where beautiful hair is just the beginning.
I'm Danise, a hairstylist, educator, and salon owner with more than 30 years in the beauty industry. After owning four award-winning salons, I never imagined I'd build another one...until now.
Join me as I document the real journey of creating Panache & Company from the ground up. From finding the perfect location and designing the salon to hiring a team, mentoring stylists, serving clients, and navigating the unexpected, you'll hear the honest conversations that happen behind every milestone.
Whether you're a client looking for trusted hair advice, a stylist building your career, or a salon owner growing your business, you'll find practical education, inspiring stories, and real-life lessons from behind the chair and beyond.
New episodes feature: • Behind-the-scenes salon building • Hair education and healthy hair tips • Business and leadership insights • Stylist career development • Client transformations • Honest conversations about entrepreneurship and life
Hair that looks amazing for five minutes and then collapses? Let’s fix that with practical, stylist-tested tactics for fine and thin hair that deliver real lift without heavy products or high-maintenance routines. We walk through five moves that create instant fullness by working with your hair’s natural behavior, not against it.
If this helped, send it to a friend who says, “My hair just won’t hold volume.” Subscribe for more practical hair care and confidence tips, and leave a review to tell us which hack gave you the biggest lift.
If you've ever styled your hair and felt cute for like say 11 minutes, then watched it fall flat before you even left the house, this episode is for you. Today we're breaking down five simple hair hacks that make thin or fine hair look instantly fuller. And a quick reminder: if you want my go-to
kit totally free. The link is in the show notes. Alright, let's get into it. Hi there, and welcome to All About Hair with Denise. If you love great hair, real advice, and that feel good kind of encouragement, you're gonna love it here. I'm Denise and every week we're talking hair care, confidence, simple beauty routines, and the kind of personal growth that feels doable. Let's get into it. Look, if you have fine hair, you don't need more hair. You need a smarter way to style your hair. Yeah, a smarter strategy, right? Because most people with fine hair aren't doing anything wrong, they're just doing what works for thick hair and wondering why it doesn't work for them. Look, the goal isn't perfection, it's just fuller looking hair that holds up in real life. So that's what we're gonna talk about today. How do we go about doing that? The biggest frustration with fine hair is this it can look amazing for like five minutes and then it just collapses, right? I get it. I got fine hair, and it's kind of a struggle sometimes. And it's not because your hair is bad, fine hair is simply lighter, softer, and it gets weighed down faster. So what we need are hacks that create the illusion, creates lift, creates structure without needing a million products. One or two will work. Here's the part no one tells you. If your hair is fine, the wrong haircut or the wrong color can make you look thinner even if your hair is healthy. I've seen this time and time again. But the right little tweaks, the cut, the color, the parting, the dry technique, it can instantly make it look thicker. So let's talk about five life-changing hair hacks for your hair. First, you want to add dimensional highlights. This one is so underrated, and I've seen it change someone's whole look in just one appointment. Here's the trick: you want to ask for soft dimension. You do not want any kind of high contrast, stripey look at all. No Kelly Clarkson
American Idol first season look for your hair. Okay. You want to ask for soft, subtle highlights. And I'm talking like if it's highlights or lowlights, you don't want to stray more than say two levels lighter or two levels darker than what your natural level is. We're just trying to create the illusion of soft dimension. You want to think natural movement and you want to add shadow. This is a trick that I use. I always use a shadowing technique in the back under the O-bone. So if you're a stylist listening to this, or you could tell your stylist this that you heard this, here's what I do. If I'm gonna put low lights, or heck, even if somebody just wants highlights in their hair, I always go in with about two tones darker from the o-bone down, and I put low lights only in then that area. I might put a few low lights sporadically throughout the rest of the hair, but I'd never ever highlight underneath. What this does is it creates the illusion of depth in your hair. It's almost like looking into a swimming pool when it's all one color. You don't know what the depth is, right? But if you add, if you put something darker underneath, then you can all of a sudden see depth and it looks deeper. Same thing happens with your hair. If you add a deeper color, and I'm not talking that look where it looks black underneath and blonde on top, no, it is really just two shades darker than your natural color, or it can be just your natural color, but you do not want to put lightness underneath the layers where the O-bone is, the occipital bone down. Make sure that that looks a little darker, and then you can start creating your highlights around your face and the crown of your hair. That's just what I do. I think it works beautifully. Okay, tip number two, you make sure that you get a haircut with blunt ends. If your hair is really fine and the ends are wispy, it can look really stringy really fast. Wow, that's a lot of really in one sentence. Sorry about that, but it's true. If you get your hair cut with a razor, I
probably wouldn't recommend that. And I probably wouldn't recommend a lot of point cutting in the ends either. I've had that done to my hair, and it just I just lose the structure of my haircut. The tip is you want blunt ends. This works because it keeps that perimeter of your hair looking dense and strong instead of tapered and thin. You can still have softness and movement, but just keep that bottom line solid. I do have a video of this about how to section out the hair to create that bottom solid line. It's basically you want to find the curve of the head. Anything under the curve of the head or the parietal ridge is what we call it, you do not want to put layers there. You only want to layer, if you're gonna get layers, from the parietal ridge or the curve of the head up. Okay, so if you're a stylist, again, if you're listening to this, you want to section off your haircut. Make sure you're only doing a blunt cut underneath the parietal ridge, only layering the top of it. Blunt doesn't have to mean heavy. You don't want just a one-length blunt haircut because that just creates no movement at all. You want a little bit of movement because you want that hair to look like it is touchable, livable, moves, right? And you want it to be intentional. Okay, here's this third tip. Flip your part. Yeah, flip flipping your part is the fastest free volume hack on the planet. And I know sometimes it might feel a little awkward to flip your part. I know that happens to me. I part my hair typically in the same common area every single day because my hair just naturally goes that way. But
you can just flip it. How this works is it lifts your roots because your hair gets trained to lay a certain way, just like I was telling you. So switching it, it forces it to lift and it forces the height into your crown area. But here's my tip, okay? Flip your part after your hair cools down. Like after you're blow drying or after you do a curling iron work, after it cools down, then you can flip it. Uh, it might feel a little awkward at first, but I think you'll get used to it. And it's actually pretty healthy for your hair to do that. Tip number four. Now this one's a little bit controversial. Blow dry upside down. I know. We all do it. I do it, but I've always tried to teach people not to do that. And the reason why is because most people blow dry upside down and they blow dry the heck out of their hair because they're doing it with no intentional sectioning. They're just upside down blow drying
the heck out of their hair. And then they flip back over and they've got this mess to calm down with a round brush. And by then you're probably exhausted, and then your hair just looks like a frizzy mess. So if you are going to blow dry upside down, I want you to be intentional because it does create root lift because what you're doing is you are blow drying upside down and forcing the hair to dry away from the scalp. But here's my tip: do it until your roots are like 80% dry, and then flip back up and finish it with a brush for shape. That's how you get volume without all the chaos of blow drying upside down. Don't blow dry 100% upside down, it'll just be a messy, frizzy. No, don't do that. My fifth tip: Velcro rollers. Yeah, they're having a moment again, and I like it. Velcro rollers, if you've never used them, here's what you'd want to do. You want to go in with dry hair. Okay, so you've already dried your hair. You want to use one big roller right at the crown. You want to make sure that
you're parting your hair the same width as the roller. You don't want to take too much hair because you'll just get it all tangled up. Put it up on the crown part of your hair, pull it forward so you're over directing it so it the base lays on its base. That really does give a little bit more volume. So don't hold it straight up and then curl it down. When you're putting the Velcro roller on your section, pull it forward and then roll it. And then hit it with warm air for like 15 seconds, let it cool, and then you can remove. Another tip I like to do is maybe hit it with warm air for 15 seconds, spray a little hairspray on there, let it cool. I could just walk around, you know, getting my shoes and socks on or finishing my makeup or whatever. Then I remove it after it's completely cool. That cooling step, that's the magic of the Velcro rulers working. Here's what I love about all of these steps. They're not about fixing you, they're about working with what you have and getting bigger results with less effort and less product. Because I know a lot of you guys don't want to use more product, and especially fine hair. If you use too much product, it's just gonna weigh your hair down. Fine hair can
look really good. It just needs the right approach. And if you want even more quick fixes like what to do when you wake up flat and how to hide oily roots, or what to do when your ends flip weird, or how to fake volume when you're running late, you want to go download my free good hair day emergency kit. It's in the show notes and it's packed with my real-world stylist tricks. Thanks
for hanging with me today. And if this episode helped you, share it with a friend who's always saying, My hair just won't hold volume. And don't forget to grab that free emergency kit download because we don't panic, right? We pivot. And always remember, when you know better, you do better. Thanks for hanging out with me today. If you love this, make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss what's next. And if you want a little extra good hair energy delivered to your door each month, go check out my good hair energy subscription box.
.png)
