Something in the world of floating have you stumped?
Show Highlights
Customers who color or perm their hair might not want to let it get wet while floating. While Graham and Ashkahn are sympathetic to those issues, as far as they know, there isn’t really a great solution for them.
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Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)
Graham: And our question today is, “is it possible to keep your hair dry during a float?” Like, I assume, for customers who want to handle their hair treatment and stuff like that. I guess the most often reason why people want dry hair is they have coloring in it, or they got it professionally permed or styled or something else that either will mess up the water or mess up their hair. And the answer’s no.
Ashkahn: And the answer’s no.
Graham: Yep, absolutely not. It does seem like having waterproof swimmer’s caps will contain the water from getting in and mixing with hair color and getting back in the tank as much. So as far as the tank is concerned, swimmer’s cap seem to help out, but for anything that won’t get your hair wet at all. And we played around with different levels of tightnesses and things that really try to bill themselves as water won’t creep in, but just the process of laying in there for an hour, an hour and a half, like moisture is pretty bound to leach through whatever system you’ve set up.
Ashkahn: Yeah, it’s a tough one. There’s many different styles of swimming caps and stuff like that out there. And they all seem to let water leak in. It’s just really hard to create that tight of a seal.
Graham: So try this, try this. What you need to do is take a garbage bag.
Ashkahn: Okay, not where I thought that was going to start.
Graham: And get some Gorilla tape. And actually create a whole seal, maybe some Elmer’s glue as well. And what you want to do is you want the bag to go across your forehead and then down and around the back of your neck. And get good contact with your skin there. And just tape. It’s not going to be fun coming out, but you know, and tape it on over your face.
Ashkahn: If you just tape the bag over your entire head, that’ll give you a real nice seal.
Graham: I did not think of that, but I like the concept.
Ashkahn: And if you pump some air in there, works as a neck pillow, double whammy.
Graham: And probably stops you from suffocating if you pump air in there too, so that’s nice.
Ashkahn: Yeah, well usually you have to poke some holes to deal with that.
Graham: What have people done when they want to keep their hair dry? We have at least one customer who comes into float with us, right before they get their hair styled. So they do a monthly hair treatment and trip to their hair stylist person. I use a barber so I get confused sometimes. But anyways, to make they’re not totally messing up their hair, that they just paid a bunch of money to get styled, they’ll go into float, often the same day as their hair treatment is going to be. So they get to ride out the past month and then go in and not worry about messing up their hair for one day. So I thought that was kind of a clever way to still have it as part of your routine, despite also having a more regimented hair care routine as well.
Ashkahn: Yeah, and I do think if you get some serious swimmer’s caps, your hair is not going to get as soaking wet as it would, just being completely loose in the float tank.
Graham: Yeah maybe, I don’t know, water just slowly gets in there and all of a sudden you just have a cap that’s keeping in water as opposed to keeping it out.
Ashkahn: Yeah, I’m sure it’ll be slightly better, but I don’t think it’s something that, if there was a reason you don’t want to get your hair wet, this wouldn’t solve that problem.
Graham: Yeah, yeah. And certainly for customers out there, this is a good answer to know for them, if they are worried about messing up a really expensive do that they got. I tell them not to. That’s when you take out the Gorilla tape.
So I think this is a pretty short episode.
Ashkahn: Yeah, let us know if someone out there has a swimmer’s cap that they actually think really manages to keep your hair dry. Let us know.
Graham: A modified like astronaut helmet or something like that they can go in with.
Ashkahn: Yeah, that sounds great.
Graham: All right, if you have any other easy questions for us, go to floattanksolutions.com/podcast, and shoot them over.
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Latest Blog Posts
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Opening up a float center is a lot like climbing a mountain. Even if you can see the peak, it’s a lot further away than you think, and when you finally get there, the journey and the destination usually end up being different than previously assumed.
In this post we’ll lay out a general process and timeline of what you may encounter on your path, from initial idea to actually operating a center.
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So you’re thinking about using volunteers in your float center?
Before we clarify what a “volunteer” actually means, we’ll first explore why a float center might be considering them in the first place. While it can be a way to provide floats to people who are otherwise unable to pay, the impulse to bring in volunteers can also stem from a desire to get some sort of free labor (later in this post we’ll dive into why you can’t actually do this, but it’s important to recognize that the instinct is understandable, especially when you have someone lined up and willing to work for free).
In addition to a desired boost in overall productivity, it’s also a way to invite more people into your center to experience what you do. Some customers actually want to help out and see what happens behind the scenes at a center.
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One of the beautiful things about the float tank is that it serves to rejuvenate the whole person. — the body, mind, heart.
Broadly speaking, it’s a tool for homeostasis, an ideal environment that supports balance, health, and growth. This piece will look specifically at floating and athletics. For anyone who defines themselves as an athlete, or as a general pursuant of athletic endeavors, the float tank can be a powerful asset.
In this post, I’ll discuss individual athletes who float and how to look at this from a marketing perspective. I’ll also discuss past and present research, and share some thoughts on how the relationship between the athletic and floating communities might continue to unfold.
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I think it’s time we addressed the giant metaphorical elephant in the salty metaphorical room — there are lots of exaggerated and untrue claims about the benefits of floating being spread around the industry.
Some are anecdotal, some are only half true, and some are just patently false. Floating has historically had a strong oral tradition tied to it — the practice has survived through word-of-mouth, one passionate floater teaching another everything they know. The unfortunate thing about this is that the information disseminated can’t be reliably tested or shared with others on a broader scale. You can’t use “my buddy Chris” as a source for a health benefit of float tanks in a newspaper article, much less for a research paper.
Now that we’re becoming a bit more mainstream, we thought it would be nice to add some clarity to what we should and shouldn’t be telling people about these difficult-to-understand, saliferous containers.
