I’ve been on a journey with my hair – and by that, I mean one involving dead ends, ill-advised detours and plenty of ‘are we nearly there yets?’ (I mean, how can it take so long to grow out a bob that was regretted the instant my hair hit the salon floor?) If you asked me for a location update right now, I’d say my hair and I are at a tricky junction. While my scalp health is finally ticking over nicely again (a course of PhilArt polynucleotide injections with Dr Aimee Vyas has put the brakes on hormonal shedding), my mid-lengths and ends are very much in need of an MOT and a shove in the right direction.
The front sections are visibly thinner in comparison to the roots, eroded by years of heat styling and ‘face-framing’ balayage. While I know that, given time and care, the damage will eventually grow out, I’m a bit lost in the meantime. As a workaround, I recently dabbled in tape hair extensions, which blessed me with glossy, thick-to-the-tips tresses for a couple of months, but time and money constraints prevented a refit, so my wefts are currently living in a bag in the salon cupboard. Ah, well.
So, back to the miserably thin ponytail I went, doing my best to minimise further damage with bond-builders. Ultimately, though, the only way to really plump up my skinny front sections is to curl the hell out of them. Effective, but also deeply self-sabotaging.
Thank goodness, then, that my nightly beauty scrolling alighted upon a video tutorial about a damage-free, instant way to fatten up your bits on the side. It’s called the Nothing2See hair halo, and, promising to require zero hairdressing skills, it did indeed sound like something sent from up above. Clearly the rest of the UK agreed, because the website promptly crashed under the stampede of skinny-haired women desperate to snap one up. Which included... me.
What is the hair halo?
It’s low-tech but deeply effective. It’s a very simple, removable headband, made of thin, clear plastic, with wefts attached like hair mudflaps around the sides. (If you imagine the areas your old geography teacher went bald, you’ll get the gist.) The hair halo comes in seven colours, and because it’s made of high-quality real hair, you can even dye it, if necessary, for the perfect match.
The headband is adjusted with a slider, and once it’s the right size for your head, you simply place it under your own hair. That sounded fiddly to me, but honestly, it was a very, very easy matter of sectioning off my crown, placing the halo over the top, then unclipping my own hair to hide the band. It took less than a minute, and I genuinely nailed it the first time I had to do it on my own.
You can wear the hair halo as often as you like – whether that’s daily, or only for special occasions – and just take it off at night, like a regular hairband. The product is the brainchild of British hairdresser Ruth Salt, who originally created it for herself during Covid after seeing how thin her hair looked on Zoom meetings. ‘It’s made such a difference, I call it my ‘secret weapon’. Then people started asking if I could make them one, and I started to think it wasn’t just me that needed something like this,’ she told me.
Unless you’re a whizz with the scissors, you’ll need to get a hairdresser to trim the hair piece so it blends with your own hair. I took mine to top stylist Philip Haug at Haug London Haus, and the whole thing took him about five minutes to fit and trim.
What’s the pro verdict?
‘I think this product’s brilliant,’ Philip told me. ‘There’s a market for people who want to have regular hair extensions but I think there are some women who just want their hair to look thicker occasionally – this would be perfect for them.’
Having a product that plumps the front of the hair is particularly helpful, in his view: ‘It’s where most women find their hair gets thinner, often from heat damage, and I think it looks really effective. You get that “corner” back at the front, and everything looks fuller and healthier.”
The GH verdict with before and afters
If I can do it, I love it. That tends to be the way it goes with me and anything related to hair styling – and did I mention I managed this first time? Smug, who? Initially, I was concerned about the plastic band peeping out and giving the game away, but once I’d combed my own hair into place, the halo seemed to magically disappear. Colleagues, who knew I was trialling this, leaned in close for a look, and couldn’t spot it.
There was something they could see, though: hair that looked far thicker and healthier. Just adding a relatively small amount of hair around the front makes a huge overall difference, purely because it’s the area you notice most. I’ve had so many compliments on my hair, both from people who know and don’t know about my ‘halo’, and I’ve worn it every day in the office since getting it.
It helps that it’s completely comfortable to wear. Whereas I was always faintly aware of wearing extensions, I completely forget about having the hair halo in. It stays in place perfectly, too – no chance of this girl’s halo slipping!
Best of all, it’s incredible for reducing damage. While you can heat style it any way you like, I’ve found that the extra thickness does away with the need to curl my hair as I would normally.
It’s not cheap at £120 from Nothing2See, but I think it’s worth every penny for how much it boosts my hair volume and my confidence.
In fact, I’m already so deeply reliant on my hair piece, I’m considering buying a back-up. (The plastic band seems pretty robust but I’m clumsy. What if I accidentally snapped it?) I find myself putting my hairy halo to bed at night as tenderly as my cat, with a gentle stroke and a whisper of “see you in the morning”. Truly, it’s my hair angel and I feel blessed to have found it.
