| Hair Boutique's Silver Hairbrush Award: World of Hair |
| Karen Marie Shelton |
| Date: 10/17/2000, 3/11/2006 |
Introduction Back in 1998 HairBoutique.com had a feature that was based on a Hair Link of the Week award. It was a great idea at the time but we quickly realized that it was a tremendous amount of work to search for great hair sites and then redo the award every single week. Although we maintained the link of the week for some time, we finally scraped the weekly link idea.  We decided to rethink the Link of The Week feature and in 1999 created the new HairBoutique.com Silver Hairbrush award. This award gave us the option to give awards to "great sites" in a variety of different categories but on a less frequent and more manageable basis.
The new award also gave us the option to expand our range of sites that we evaluated to include hair, beauty, fashion and related sites that would be complimentary to hair. The last site that won the Silver Hairbrush Award was TheKiss.com in March of 1999 which has continued its award winning ways while morphing into Virtual Kiss.com.
Dusting Off The Silver Hairbrush Although we have not awarded a Silver Hairbrush in quite some time, the reason we have abstained is because of our inability to make a final decision. When HairBoutique.com was launched in March of 1998 (upon the remains of the now defunct Long Hair Video site), the hair sites were few and far between. When we first created the Link of Week we had an easy time honoring the top notch hair sites like Hairdos.com and The Long Hair Site. As 1998 became 1999 the number of hair sites were starting to multiply like rabbits. We often had a hard time keeping track of all of them. Even worse, there were so many good ones that we had an even harder time deciding which ones were the best. After TheKiss.com award was presented we assigned a free lance Hairboutique.com contributor to recommend some sites for us to review. Although it seemed like an easy assignment, after a couple of weeks our free lancer threw up her hands and decided the responsibility was too heavy too endure. Her lists were long and unyieldy and impossibly to select from. The Silver Hairbrush languished in our scan library and we busied ourselves with less stressful tasks.
Indecision Blasted Skyhigh Recently the HairBoutique.com was notified that they had been selected as Top of The Web for hair by not one but three different award committees. We were flattered and also somewhat guilt ridden. After all, we had dropped our own award giving ball due to indecision. After some waffling we all agreed to make another attempt and starting to award some worthy sites the HairBoutique.com Silver Hairbrush award. I fortified myself with Diet Coke (yes, I know it is bad for me and my hair) and a stack of CDs and started a frantic clickeratsi session surfing through hundreds of hair, beauty, fashion and related sites. I looked at all our previous winners including The Long Hair Site, NaturallyCurly.com, Hairdos.com and HotLocks.com. Yes they are alive and well, I am happy to report. However, we all decided that we wanted to give our award to a site that had never won a Silver Hairbrush before and really deserved it. We wanted to get back in the award giving mode by starting out with a great hair site that had made a major effort to continue to improve their role in the consumer haircare arena. Why World of Hair Was Selected After much agonizing, mousing and handwringing we all agreed that the World of Hair had accomplished major things in the past two years as consumer hair site. Yes, they also cover other beauty related topics to an extent, but they are, in our opinion, a consumer hair site. More importantly as we were talking about all our candidate hair sites, we all agreed that World of Hair's progression in the consumer hair care world has been very impressive. The World of Hair team obviously puts a lot of hours into their wonderful site which changes constantly as it continues to evolve into a well rounded and information focused site for hair consumers. The primary focus of the World of Hair site, as we see it, is to help hair consumers find new hairstyles, learn to style their hair, view latest hair trends, view featured sites, try out virtual salons and purchase haircare, beauty and other items online. They also do a great job of providing a series of great directories with a vast array of information about hair, skin and beauty.
Great Directories The World of Hair site consists of some great directories. They have a Schools and Academies Directory complete with the name of the school/academy along with a detailed description. I looked through several of the lists and it offer any stylist wannabe a great starting point for finding a good school. They also have a Hairstyle Galleries page that lists all the major hair sites that have hairstyle galleries on the Web. All of our favorites are in the list including George Caroll, The Long Hair Site and Hairdos.com. World of Hair has also recently opened their own Gallery of styles which they are in the process of adding styles to. One of my favorite sections of World of Hair is their Alphabetical Directory of other salons, hair and beauty related sites. Since I am always trolling the Net for new sites to add to all of our hair link pages I like to check out the sites that World of Hair recommends. While we often have the same sites listed I have found some interesting new hair hang-ups listed in their directories. In addition, they offer great directories for cosmetic sites. What's New World of Hair has been working hard to increase their product offerings. They recently launched a new feature that ties together information about some of the hair care products that they co-market with Drugstore.com. As part of their wide net of co-marketing they offer some great hair and beauty related products that include books through Amazon.com, electronics and software. World of Hair also has featured hair and beauty sites of the month. For October the featured sites are industry giants Redken and Vidal Sasson. Summary Stop by and visit World of Hair and be sure to tell them that HairBoutique.com sent you. Keep this ever changing hair site on your radar. They are slated to do even more great things down the road. Our congratulations to everyone at World of Hair for wining the HairBoutique.com Silver Hairbrush Award for their great consumer focused hair site. |