QALI Diaries

As someone who spent years using drugstore shampoo without a bottle of conditioner in sight, one of the biggest improvements to my lazy hair routine has been investing in the right hair products. Like filling in your eyebrows, you don’t realize how much of a difference it makes until you start doing it - and then wonder what you’ve been doing your whole life until that point. 

evo x QALI

When we were deciding which retail lines to carry at QALI, evo ticked all the boxes; it was something a little different than what you could find in every other salon, it had a dedication to sustainability and eco-conscious beauty and it had great products. The packaging was also perfectly on brand with its colourful labels and cheeky descriptions (love that Aussie humour). 

evo®'s mission is to create innovative, salon-only products that are simple, luxurious and effective to use: to tell the truth; expose the frauds: keep the hair and beauty industry honest. 

Navigating the world of beauty products can be wild - it seems like every company claims to have the best this or the best that or some magical hair serum that will repair split ends, add 4 inches of length and get you back together with your ex. There’s nothing worse than being bombarded with pushy sales tactics to buy things you don’t need, which is why we carefully chose the product lines we sell and only recommend products that we use and love ourselves. 

evo products are free from sulfates, parabens, silicones and other unpronounceable chemicals found on the back of shampoo bottles - they’re also accredited PETA cruelty free and substitute synthetic ingredients with natural ones when possible. To break it down, there are no cancer-causing chemicals that can damage or suffocate your hair, they minimize their environmental impact by using naturally sourced ingredients and no cute bunnies are ever harmed. They also purchase government carbon offset credits to make up for the unavoidable carbon impact that comes with any manufacturing process. 

evo x YOU

For anyone navigating the hair care world for the first time, knowing what products to buy can be tricky - the great thing is that we use all of the products that we sell.  When you come in for a treatment we’ll use the products best suited to your hair type and what you’re looking for so you can try them out before deciding if you want to buy some to take home. 

evo products are meant to complement each other so you can create whole new products by mixing and using multiple products together. You can take a moisturizing treatment and mix it with a volumizing lotion so you get hydration as well as volume, you can mix a texturizing clay with shine drops to get hold and shine or you can mix a volumizing mousse and volumizing powder to get maximum lift and hold - the possibilities are endless.

If you come down during a busy time, one of the first things you’ll notice when you walk in is that it smells so.fricken.good in here. The word on the street is that the person who develops evo’s scents came over from Tom Ford - there’s nothing better than great looking hair that smells amazing too. I avoided using dry shampoo because I couldn’t stomach the smell of most of them, but evo has managed to create one that I really like. If the Shebang-a-bang dry spray wax was a perfume I would wear it. 

Stay tuned for most blog posts showing off our favourite products and how to use them, drop a comment if there’s anything you want to see!    

xo Alyssa

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Hi, I’m Alyssa and I am the laziest person when it comes to doing my hair. Which is pretty ironic, since I’m the manager at QALI. 
Don’t get me wrong, I love having my hair done and feel like my best self when my hair is curled with 15 types of texturizing sprays in it, but I would rather spend an extra 30 minutes sleeping in the morning than get up and do my hair. I wouldn’t say doing my hair is a priority in my life/getting ready routine but I always want my hair to look good. Dilemma. 

I used to work in the film industry as a visual effects line producer which meant I was often working 14 hour days in a male-dominated, very casual work environment. My hair was in an (unwashed) top knot 5 days out of 6 and if I washed my hair and wore it down everyone thought I made some sort of drastic change overnight. It took some of my coworkers 6 month to notice I had blonde highlights. It was hard to feel motivated to do my hair when there wasn’t anyone to appreciate it, and when it really didn’t matter. I was at a desk or a dark screening room 90% of the time surrounded by the same people who didn’t care what I looked like.  

I have a complicated relationship with my hair - I have a lot of thick, straight hair that I usually keep pretty long and when I take the time to style it I feel like I can take on the world. The downside to having lots of hair is the maintenance - washing and drying it takes foreeeever and when I let it grow out long (out of laziness) it feels heavy and lifeless and is hard to style. I was the worst with maintaining my colour and would often leave too many months in between refreshes and toners (what even is a toner?) and then I would be unhappy and frustrated with how my hair looked even though it was fully in my power to improve it.
I’m happy to say I’m on the road to recovery and have started gathering all the lazy girl hot tips to keep my hair under control with relatively minimum maintenance.

1. Regular trims! When I started colouring my hair, my ends would get pretty crispy from the bleaching, blow drys and hot tool use. Alot of salons will offer a dry trim for around $30 and it’s definitely worth it to keep my ends healthy and looking taken care of. For the same amount of time and money as lunch at Tacofino (with a margarita) I can get a quick trim and feel like I have my life together a bit more. Since I have a lot of hair it feels great to have it thinned out as well, especially in the summer. 
2. Take home colour shampoo/conditioner. If you’re going to be paying any amount of money to colour your hair, you might as well spend a few extra dollars to get some take home products to keep it fresh in between salon visits which will ultimately save you money in the long run. For my dark hair and blonde balayage, a good purple shampoo is a game changer - it costs about $30 and lasts forever because I only use it once a week or so. There are so many customizable take home treatments now so no matter what you do to your hair, there’s a product that will help keep you feeling fresh without adding 10 steps to your showering routine.
3. Blowout spray - game changer. I fully admit that I lived 26 years on this planet without knowing that you could put things on wet hair that would make it blowdry faster. The years of my life that could have been  saved had I known this earlier…. I realized one of the biggest problems I had with my hair was how it looked after it was blow dried - it would get very straight and slippery and couldn’t be styled afterwards because it would all just fall out. Enter the blowout spray - it speeds up my drying time and leaves my hair with some nice texture and grit so I can add waves or curls that last. This is probably the single biggest revelation I’ve had on my journey to fly hair - I kind of look forward to washing my hair now because with a little bit of effort I’m actually happy with how my hair looks after I dry it. 

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