Pamper your locks

SPENDING three hours at a hair spa sounds like an impossible luxury, especially if you're a busy professional. Working women with young families are even more strapped for time, one would expect. But it's these working professionals - with their harried lifestyles - who form the demographic most likely to show stress in their lacklustre locks, or worse, thinning hair.

Which means that a trichological treatment isn't so much a luxury but a necessity these days where modern day stress is showing in the scalp. More than a decade ago, when former SIA stewardess Anita Wong was flying regularly, and encountering problems with her hair, she realised how difficult it was to find a hair salon with staff who were knowledgeable about hair and scalp health. "The first step to having beautiful hair is a healthy scalp, but in those days very few people knew about this," she highlights. She opened her first salon in 2006, and PHS now has three outlets, with possible joint ventures overseas.

This is certainly a sign that PHS is on to something. As Ms Wong explains it - and she's done her research - is that although the hair might be just made up of dead cells, they reflect one's overall health condition. And then there's the scalp. An unhealthy, imbalanced scalp will simply choke the strands of hair growing out. Which is why PHS's three-step programme is about detoxifying the scalp, then stabilising it followed by regrowing hair.