Elyse Marie Bertoletti, Elysium Biodynamic Salon & Spa

Elyse MariE Bertoletti, who owns Elysium Biodynamic Salon & Spa with her husband, Rodrigo Bertoletti, tries to live an organic, holistic lifestyle. But her job as a hairstylist wasn’t aligning with those values and she had a realization. She was pregnant with her oldest son and had just opened a jar of hair color. “The smell of the chemicals just hit me in the face. I immediately felt like I was living a lie—my professional life was not reflecting my personal life,” Bertoletti says. This was the catalyst for opening Elysium, which uses nontoxic products, minimizes the use of plastics, and believes hair health is interconnected with your mental and overall health. Bertoletti sat down with My Mo-Town to talk about organic products, her dislike of trends, and more. 

How does hair health relate to physical health?

Hair shows what’s going on in the rest of your body. For instance, as women age, their changing hormone levels can show up in their hair, making it thinner or more fragile. Things like thyroid issues can affect the proteins in hair, too, and that, in turn, affects the coloring process. Also, when we’re stressed, our hair is usually stressed out, too. It all connects. 

The salon uses nontoxic products. How are those different from organic products?

For truly organic products, we’re talking about henna or coffee as hair color. You’re not necessarily going to get the result you want with either of those. With henna, for example, you’re very limited in color tones—it’s lots of reds—and it’s transparent, so it’s not covering gray hair. But you’re coming to a salon because you want a certain result. We’ve married these two thought processes—we’re not using coffee to color your hair, but we’re not using toxic products that are going to harm you. 

Scalp care is all the rage right now. Why is your scalp so important to the health of your hair?

Scalp care started thousands of years ago with Japanese women who performed rituals with their hair and protein-rich rice water. But you can’t expect your hair to be healthy if your scalp is not. Think of your scalp almost like soil. Everything grows from there, so if your scalp has issues, you cannot expect that the hair that grows from it will be at its best either. We focus on scalp detoxes. Whether you have eczema, psoriasis, or are just dealing with oil buildup or flakes, we cleanse the scalp and create a fresh, healthy environment for the hair follicle to breathe and grow to its potential. 

It’s summertime. Any tips for dealing with chlorine buildup in your hair?

I always suggest vitamin C. You can order vitamin C powder online and you mix it with your favorite conditioner. Heat it up a little bit, or put on a shower cap and sit in the sun, and you will actually see if you have chlorine buildup. There’s no formula to follow at all. Just mix the two together, and it’s a fun little science experiment. The water from your hair will be blue or green in the shower cap. That’s all the chemicals leaving your hair. 

How do you protect your hair at the beach?

My first tip is always to go and have fun! If you’re going to the beach and know you’re going to swim—and you should swim and have a great time!—you might want to saturate your hair with a leave-in conditioner before getting in the water. This creates a protective seal so you can go and enjoy yourself. 

Any hair trends you like right now?

I don’t like focusing on hair trends because they are trends for a reason—they don’t necessarily work for everyone! It’s like I tell my kids: You are an individual. You should be doing what works for you, not just doing what’s popular. But one thing I’m happy about is that women aren’t using permanent color to cover up their gray as much. They’re camouflaging the gray, not covering or hiding it, and creating this trend I love. They’re still coming in to get their hair colored, but they are letting the gray live with other pigments. That’s a trend I will stand behind.