We have just finished up our brand new contest entry application. What does this mean to you? Free stuff! Several people have already found it and entered. This week we’re giving away a Zents Sun Concreta to the lucky person drawn at random from our entrants. Next week…. who knows? If you have any ideas for contests, let us know. We’ll have random drawings but, we will hopefully have some more creative things coming up later.

Entering the contest is free and easy. As always, we value your privacy. Your name will not be sold, shared or given away. Please enter only once per contest. But, you can come back and enter contest after contest.

I keep telling Brian to “calm down”. But, he is so excited he can barely sit still. If you have been with us for the last year or so, you know we have made some major upgrades to the website. This one is the biggest yet, in our opinion, and we cannot wait to tell you about it. It has been in development for about a year and we finally have it ready to go!We now have a feature we call “My Account”. This is going to be awesome for repeat customers. You know how when you came back to order before you had to enter all your billing and shipping information again? Or when you called in an order, we had to ask you all of that stuff every time? Or how about when you ordered something you loved but when you com back to shop, you cannot remember the name of it or what section it’s in? Now, all of those problems are history.

“My Account”, using your email address and a password, will allow you to automatically enter your shipping and billing information at check out. This will eliminate errors in typing in your address, which slows down your order processing. “My Account” will also allow you to create a list of “My Favorites”, a personal shopping list of items you buy frequently. By logging in and going to your favorites, you can add them directly to your cart without having to search for them. Lastly, “My Account” will keep a history of your orders. So, if you have tried a product you like and want to order it again, you can simply view a past order and add it directly to your cart from there.

We know you are going to have questions about “My Account”. So, we have taken the ones we have anticipated and posted them here . Please feel free to begin using the feature right away. Just visit www.treasuredlocks.com, click on the My Account link at the top of any page and create your account.

Treasured Locks may not be the first place you think of when buying a Christmas gift. But, don’t forget about us. We have several items that would make wonderful gifts for just about anyone. And, don’t forget we can wrap it up for you. For a small extra fee, we’ll wrap it up all nice and pretty and create color, personalized greeting card printed with your own thoughts and words.

A few gift ideas include.

• Indigo Wild Frankincense & Myrrh Products- wonderful, exotic smelling products that are so appropriate during the holiday season. Frankincense & Myrrh is the fragrance of kings. We have the following Frankincense & Myrrh products available:
  • Room and Body Mist
  • Natural Organic Lotion
  • Natural Soy Candle
  • Body & Massage Oil
  • Roll-On Perfume
• Paddywax Candles- natural vegetable wax candles with intoxicating aromas.
• Zents- anything from Zents makes a wonderful gift. Fragrances of the stars in everything from a solid perfume box (Concreta) to candles to body oils.

As an exclusively on-line retailer, you can probably guess how we are going to answer this question. But, hold on. We have good reason to feel it’s not only perfectly safe to order on-line, it’s a great idea. Using your credit card on-line is actually more secure than using it at your local restaurant. As my friend and I were discussing this at lunch yesterday, I pointed out to him that in the old days, credit card numbers were printed out, unencrypted right on the slip (remember carbon paper and those machines they used to put your credit cards in?). Even thought credit card readers are used now so that the number isn’t printed out, employees in certain establishments have purchased readers that can steal your credit card number. When you hand it to that waiter to process, how do you know what he does with it before he brings it back? It recently been reported that many large retailers are using less-than-state-of-the-art wireless networks to broadcast your credit card number through the store. Anyone with a laptop and a cheap piece of software can drive by the store and pick up your credit card number.

Security Of Internet Transactions
In the case of an on-line store, any modern retailer (this one included) uses encryption when your credit card is sent over the Internet. You enter it in plain text in the privacy of your own home. But, when you hit the enter key, the number is scrambled so that, if anyone were “sniffing” on the line, they would only see a series of meaningless bits. When your information arrives at the intended location, a “key” is used to unlock and reassemble the data. Your information is only seen again at the intended location. In the case of Treasured Locks, we do not store any personal information of clients (including credit card numbers) on our computers. We use Yahoo which is one of the largest, oldest and most trusted etailers on the Internet to provide our store services. Yahoo uses state-of-the art technology to store this information.

The Real Risk
Maybe you don’t understand or trust encryption. And, let’s be honest. Even with encryption, anytime you use your credit card number anywhere, some unscrupulous employee of the business might steal it. So, let’ s look at the worst case. Someone steals your credit card. What happens?

As soon as you find out your credit card number has been stolen (whether it’s over the Internet or someone steals your wallet), report it. At this point, you are not liable for any subsequent charges. That’s the law. From the Federal Trade Commission

“If you lose your credit or charge cards or if you realize they’ve been lost or stolen, immediately call the issuer(s). Many companies have toll free numbers and 24 hour service to deal with such emergencies. By law, once you report the loss or theft, you have no further responsibility for unauthorized charges. In any event, your maximum liability under federal law is $50 per card.”

Most credit card companies will not even hold you to the $50 as long as you promptly report your card stolen, as soon as know. The key is when you know. If someone steals your card and goes on a spree, you are not responsible as long as you report it when you find out the number has been stolen. Just a tip from us to you, do not pay for credit card “loss protection” That’s the real rip off, according to the FTC. Having a credit card number stolen is not the same as having your identity stolen. Credit card numbers are easily canceled. A single phone call can have your card deactivated in minutes and you are not responsible for any charges after that and no more than $50 maximum (per card). Recently (yesterday), I thought a replacement card was lost in the mail and called in to report it. A few minutes later I found the card and called back. It was too late, the company had already killed the account and issued a new number. For anyone who had that number, it is now and forevermore worthless. I had a card stolen from my mailbox several years ago. The person who took it went on a shopping spree charging up around $1,500 as I recall. American Express asked me to simply tell them which charges that month were mine and which were bogus. They took the bogus charges off my bill and I didn’t have a single problem after that. They did issue a new account number.

If you still don’t feel comfortable trusting your credit card information to a retailer you don’t know, there are third party payment services like PayPal, that will allow you to give this information to them and pay the merchant via them. That way the merchant never even sees your credit card information.

The Advantages of Using a Credit Card

Keep in mind that stealing your credit card number is not the same as identity theft. While you should be a responsible consumer and protect your credit card number to avoid any hassles, using a credit card is actually a very safe and convenient way of purchasing, even over the Internet. Most (every?) credit card company offers consumer protection. If you order something from a merchant and don’t receive it, your credit card company will go to bat for you and can get your money back. If you pay a merchant by check or money order and never get anything, you are out of luck unless you’re willing to take them to small claims court. PayPal also offers consumer protection services. By paying with a credit card, you are giving yourself some recourse in dealing with unknown parties. Pay by a check or a money order and that’s the real risk.

We often receive requests for coupons. The best way to be informed of sales and buying opportunities is to make sure you subscribe to our customer newsletter and/or our blog. You can sign up for our newsletter by visiting our site and clicking on the button near the bottom of each page. You can sign up for the blog right here!

Please understand that it is our intent to bring the best possible values to you every day with or without a coupon. Many stores have artificially high prices, which they “discount” to make you feel you are getting a deal. We want you to feel comfortable buying at any time knowing you are getting a great value. We offer volume pricing on many of our products and free ground shipping. We encourage you to take advantage of those opportunities, which can add up to significant savings. We also throw in gifts with many orders and often upgrade shipping from Ground to Priority or UPS Shipping with Tracking, at no extra charge.

We will occasionally have sales and offer special discounts to customers who read the blog or the newsletter. If you’re on those lists, you’ll be notified when we have coupons available.

Hi, I’m Tywana Smith and I own and operate TreasuredLocks.Com. Treasured Locks is a small, black owned company that sells high quality hair and skin care products, predominantly for the needs of African Americans and people of color. While most of our products are excellent for all hair and skin types, our focus is to make available the best products on the market to people who have special needs. We know you have unique needs and we are here to meet them for you

We chose the name for Treasured Locks for many reasons. First, like treasure, quality hair care products for black people can be hard to find. As more of us move away from areas where there are local stores to cater to our needs, we find ourselves running all over town just to find the basics. Secondly, your Secondly, your hair or your locks is a treasure to you. Our hair has unique requirements, and we must take care of it properly to unlock the beauty contained within. Treasured Locks was created out of my personal frustration with finding quality black hair care products and information on how to care for my family’s hair and skin.

Continue Reading >>

We have just completed a major upgrade to our Natural Hair Care Salon Directory making it even easier to use to find locations (including a fancy new Google mapping feature so you can actually see exactly where the salon is located). We have also made it easier to add your favorite salon. We will be offering standard listings for free and enhanced listings (including a link to the salon website and a description of the salon) are available to salons that contact us to learn about the requirements.

Check out the new directory here: Natural Hair Care Salon Directory

Well, my mother thinks so anyway. We were mentioned in the Cincinnati Enquirer this past Friday. I’ve finally taken the plunge and begun transitioning to natural hair for real this time. I had toyed with the idea for years and gotten off to a few false starts. But, this time, I’m well on my way. Here is a picture of my hair now:

Here’s a link to the article. My picture was in the paper. But, it’s not in the on-line version. Cincinnati Enquirer Article

We have completed phase I of our site renovation. We hope you like our new look. We’ve added some new functionality such as a better checkout process and the ability to accept PayPal payments (which several of you have been requesting).

Over the next couple of months, we’ll be putting more underneath the skin. But, for now, enjoy our new look.

Happy shopping!

The Treasured Locks Team

Treasured Locks is pleased to be able to tell you about a fantastic website for information about black hair. We have been partnering, in one way or the other, with OurHair.Net pretty much since we launched four years ago. We often refer our clients there. The site is chock-full of information concerning how to care for your hair, articles on the trials & tribulations of the decision to go natural or not, etc. There is also a nice, active message board where you can interact with the staff as well as with other women having the same concerns you have.

OurHair was built just for the needs of woman of color living in the modern world. Their main mission is to help educate you with information in a welcoming, positive atmosphere, which incorporates an understanding of the unique attributes of our hair. They do a great job of furthering the African American and Ethnic woman’s understanding of her hair and how to best care for it. The site is an information based web site funded by the owner and contributed to by highly talented graphic artists and writers. OurHair we encourages you to submit your photos or articles about African American hair and Ethnic hair care issues.

Please check out OurHair.net and tell them Treasured Locks sent you.

Peace,
The Treasured Locks Team

What is a blog?

Well, a blog is kind of a running newsletter. We will post news, sales, etc. about Treasured Locks and you can visit a website page to read them. A blog will usually allow you to leave comments for the blogger. You can reach our blog by visiting us at http://blog.treasuredlocks.com Our blog will not take the place of our regular newsletter. But, it will be updated much, much more often and the newsletter will have links back to the blog.

A really cool thing about a blog is you can subscribe to it through a pretty new technology. This is even better than subscribing to our email newsletter because the blog is updated more often. And, you can leave comments on the blog for us and for others. But, the best thing about subscribing to our blog is you can be updated without filling up your email mailbox. You do not receive email notifications when a blog is updated. You use something called a NewsReader that gives you a notice when there is a new post made to a website that you are interested in. You then visit the site and read the news.

How to subscribe to a blog
Subscribing to a blog, if you’re not familiar with newsreaders is a little tricky. Hopefully, it is going to get easier as the technology matures and the capability is built into browsers. It’s already there for the Macintosh in Safari. But, for Windows, there are only a few options now:

If you use Yahoo as your homepage, you can click on the My Yahoo icon at the left side of our blog page and that will add the “feed” to your Yahoo homepage. You’ll see it just like your news headlines. This is a very, very easy way to do this (assuming you are using Yahoo as your homepage). If you are not using Yahoo as your homepage and want to, visit Yahoo , click on the My Yahoo icon at the top of the page. Arrange the page the way you want and make it your homepage. Then, visit our blog, click on the My Yahoo button and go from there.

If you already have a newsreader (you’re probably not reading this), just make your way to our XML feed and add us. Our XML feed is at: http://blog.treasuredlocks.com/feed/
It is important to subscribe to the XML feed link and not the regular blog link. If you don’t already have a newsreader, this is going to be a little more tricky. There are several newsreaders available and they all work a little differently.

• Pluck is an integrated newsreader that installs itself in your browser. That’s nice and convenient. There are versions for both Internet Explorer and Firefox. We found it pretty easy to use. But, it’s supported by ads, which you might find annoying. And, in the short time we played with it, we could not figure out how to get from the article back to the main blog.
• Awasu is a stand-alone application (that also doubles as a browser). It’s kind of complicated. But, for Windows, we like it best. It allows you to click on an article in the reader to actually visit the website. Downside, is you have to download a separate application and run it and it was a little difficult figuring out how to get a feed into the reader. But, once we got our feed in, we liked the way it worked.
• NetNewsReader Lite is great. But, it’s for MacIntosh only. Very easy to use. It was bought by NewsGator. Hopefully, they’ll come out with a Windows version.
• Safari (also for MacIntosh) has a built-in reader.
• There are web-based readers, too, where you visit their site to find your news. NewsGator is one of those. We didn’t really like having to visit a site to find our news. But, it seems to work pretty well.

If all of this is way too confusing to you, don’t despair. You can always just periodically visit our blog at http://blog.treasuredlocks.com and read it at your leisure. Make sure you bookmark it.

The Truth About Sodium Laurel Sulfate

Since we began searching for natural products for our daughter about 7 years ago, we’ve come across all kinds of controversies and misinformation concerning many product ingredients. One of the biggest controversies surrounds Sodium Laurel Sulfate. For those of you not familiar, sodium laurel (& laureth) or SLS is a surfactant used in shampoos, toothpastes and liquid soaps. You’ll often find SLS or its derivatives even in “all natural” products. After all, SLS is derived from a natural source. And, as we have stated in other places, natural is a relative term. Once you combine any two ingredients, one could claim a product is natural or not natural. SLS is derived from coconut. So, some people consider it to be natural. It’s just as natural as “grapefruit seed extract”. But, is that really the point? The question we think is relevant is “Is SLS harmful?”

SLS is a foaming and cleaning agent. Its controversy stems from the belief by some that it is highly toxic, highly irritating and carcinogenic. Some people have gone so far as to avoid any product with Sodium Laurel Sulfate or any of its chemical cousins. Because of our personal concerns for our family and our position in the industry, we have studied this issue, with great interest, and from both sides. We realize that some manufacturers have a stake in promoting the use of SLS and some have a stake (those who make “alternative” products) in villifying it. We don’t want to be responsible for hype on either side of this issue. We could offer either or both types of products. Unfortunately, whenever you read anything on the subject, you must take into the consideration the interests of the author. What will he or she gain if you accept her position? Whilethere are some people who believe SLS is unsafe, there are just as many who point to the fact that it has been used for decades with no proven serious health risks.

Here are the facts. SLS, in its pure form, is a skin irritant. But, no one suggests you put pure SLS on your skin hour after hour and leave it there. That’s the way irritability tests are performed. Pure SLS is placed on the skin and left for hours. In that form it is deemed an irritant. However, in health and beauty formulations, SLS is highly diluted by the other ingredients and is usually rinsed off (in the case of shampoos or body washes) or rinsed out- (in the case of toothpastes), minimizing or eliminating the irritating effects. Only those with highly sensitive skin are adversely harmed by the levels of SLS in most products and these effects are usually just mild skin irritations (rash or dry skin).

The Myth

In the late 1990s a myth began making its way around the Internet that claimed SLS causes cancer. This email myth spread rapidly and was taken up by manufacturers of alternative products. In searching for the truth about this myth, we could not find one unbiased, credible source to back it up. There is strong evidence that a manufacturer of alternative products started this myth. But, even without proof of this, what we have found is no one can seem to find a credible source for this belief. Like many Internet email myths it has taken on a life of its
own and has shown how if something is repeated often enough, it can become accepted as indisputable truth by those who suddenly hear it from multiple “credible” sources.

Our conclusion on SLS is this. It is a potential irritant. For people with extremely sensitive skin, it is possible they should avoid Sodium Laurel Sulfate. But the studies for skin irritation involve applying pure SLS to the shaved skin of an albino rat, hour after hour with no rinsing. (So, don’t do that.) SLS is used so commonly because it is a very good surfactant (agent that helps water be more effective). Products without SLS simply will not foam as well and many people don’t like that. Many people want lots of foam from their shampoos and body washes. SLS is a great way to get that foam. Also, we believe that SLS is potentially drying to African American hair and skin. For that reason, we prefer products that use milder forms of surfactants (like the often confused SLES or Sodium Laureth Sulfate) or products that use SLS in lower concentrations (further down the ingredient list). Most salon grade shampoos (including the ones we offer) use these alternative surfactants.

Our plan is to offer both products with SLS and those that are SLS free. The SLS products tend to clean better, foam better and are usually less expensive. For the vast majority of people, we think they are fine. We use them personally. However, for those who want to avoid SLS (and its cousins) all together, we will continue to offer sulfate free products.

Alternative Surfactants
Ammonium Lauryl Sulfate and Sodium Laureth Sulfate are two alternatives to Sodium Laurel
Sulfate. Unfortunately, the controversy over these two compounds is just about as crazy as the
controversy over SLS. Some manufacturers have claimed they are milder and safer. Other manufacturers (who by the way have decided not to use them) claim they are even harsher than SLS.

Conclusions
We’ll keep this short. We have enough research to fill up about 20 pages. But, our job here is to present you with the big picture. What should you do when you hear a rumor about an ingredient? First of all, remain calm. When you hear a report of a dangerous ingredient, consider the source. In fact, first find out the source. If a friend tells you or you get an email, find out where the information originated. Then, do your own research and try to look at both sides. Go to responsible websites like the American Cancer Society and find out what they have to say.

If you’re interested in learning more:

Go to the American Cancer Society’s website and do a search on Sodium Lauryl Sulfate. If this ingredient even possibly caused cancer, wouldn’t they report on it?

Several of you have asked us about Treasured Locks making contributions to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. We, like everyone else, have been deeply touched and disturbed by the images coming out of New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast. Treasured Locks is endeavoring to do our part to help with relief in a number of ways, including cash donations, product donations and labor in helping get supplies to those affected.

Treasured Locks will continue to contribute to the efforts to help the thousands of displaced families as we can over the coming months. We ask you to do the same. Be careful of scams though. Our recommendation is to only give money to reputable organizations such as the Red Cross and the Salvation Army. Avoid, any website popping up asking for money for Hurricane Katrina victims.

Peace,
Brian

We recently lowered the prices on all of our HumiNature Facial Care products. Now they are not only the best, all natural face care products available. But, the price is even more reasonable than before. We also lowered the price on the Treasured Locks H2G Hair Growth Vitamins bringing them way, way below the price of the next best competitor and making them comparably priced to even some of the lesser quality products in the market.

As always, we are looking for the perfect mix of products to bring to you. Relatively soon, we will be discontinuing a few products. But, we have more than adequate replacements for most of them.

One product line we will soon be discontinuing without an immediate replacement is the line of sleep caps, durags, etc. from Spartan Brands. Unfortunately, Spartan Brands has changed their policies and we will not be able to continue to carry their products. We are considering bringing in some higher quality head gear like sleep caps and wraps. But, we’re not sure how those would go over. What do you think? Would you be willing to pay more for higher quality head coverings or are you just as happy picking up something at your local beauty supply store?

This blog site looks a little better than our old one. So, we’re going to try things over here for a while. Make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed to get all of the updates.

Peace,
Brian