Salon Confessions Podcast

On this episode, we invited Harper's friend Mari Ruddy to come in and get a pedicure and tell us about her story and her book Extreme Healing: Reclaim Your Life and Learn to Love Your Body . Extreme Healing shares Mari's journey of finding salvation through cycling, running, and triathlon. These activities carried her through trauma, type 1 diabetes, and three rounds of cancer. In this boo...

Ten years ago when Harper met her now husband Hudson, he brought a vibrant young 12-year-old into her life, her step-kiddo and soul-child, Grey.   Grey is someone with depth, alertness, creativity, sensitivity, and an adventurous spirit.  Grey has never walked the straight and narrow road, but has always found her way, meeting life's challenges with courage and confidence. Grey is a senior in...

The great thing about Life Hacks is they can be ANYTHING.  It can be things about cleaning your house or your stuff, managing your time, salvaging and repurposing, changing your mindset, cooking and meal planning, or just about anything that is a part of your daily life that someone has figured out an easier way to do.  And really, all of us have life hacks.  Maybe some of them are things we picke...

Welcome to Season 5 of Salon Confessions! On our first episode of the season, we are talking about SLEEP!  Do you remember being young and able to sleep through the night all the way until 11am or even noon?  Harper was never great at falling asleep, but she didn’t suffer from sleepless nights very often.  Yet every decade, that precious commodity of sleep just seems to slip further and further aw...

Each year for many years, Jen and Harper have chosen a word of the year to help guide and direct our mindset for the year ahead.  Choosing a word of the year is different than making a resolution.  We are not about the “new year, new me” attitude that is so quick to fail.   A word of the year is intentionally open to interpretation, and helps guide our thoughts, actions, and beliefs.  In years pas...

In this episode, Jen and Harper are walking back through our 2024 seasons 3 and 4, reminding ourselves what we’ve done and how much fun we’ve had, and helping you get to know us a bit if you are new.  And if you are a long-time listener, we hope this episode is a fun walk down memory lane too.  We thank you so much for being here with us on this journey, for being loyal Confessionistas, and encour...

With the war that is raging over healthcare and women’s rights to have agency over the private choices that they make with their healthcare providers, we realize that our listeners want to talk about these issues more.  Women of all ages are frustrated and outraged at the lack of care, the cost of care, and the poor quality of care. Even more than that, the research and education on women’s biolog...

A few weeks ago Jen and Harper kicked off a sub-series called “Jen and Harper Try it Out.” In our Try it Out Series, we give things a try that you might see ads for on social media that look really interesting but you aren’t sure whether they will be worth it or not. It might be a new kind of medspa treatment, or self-care, or unique therapy or experience. Harper recently saw a BOGO ad for a Float...

This year has been a year of trial and error and learning for Jen and Harper, figuring out what treatments, prescriptions, and supplements will work for us as we go through perimenopause, Hashimoto’s, ADHD, and other women’s issues and aging issues.  Since we’ve spent so much time sharing our challenges, we’re dedicating this episode to sharing some updates with you on what treatments we’ve landed...

Because we share a lot of very personal and intimate confessions on this show, we’ve chosen to keep our names and faces confidential, so you probably don’t know that Jen is a curly red head, and Harper is a long-haired wavy blondy-brown-silvery head.  We both recently entered our 50s and talk a lot about the aging process on this show, but one thing we haven’t talked a lot about is the great debat...

Jen & Harper have a lot of fun with their husbands. Jen & "OfJen" and Harper & Hudson spend a lot of time laughing in their marriages, and in today's episode, we are sharing some of our best and funniest marriage stories. These are the gut-busters, the giggle-fests, and the truest of true confessions. We bring you into our homes and tell you all the god's honest truths about what reall...

Back in Season 2, we did an episode called “Drive Thru Pie: The Fine Art of Dating Your Spouse” and it is one of our top 10 episodes. During that episode, I referenced a couple I know that does a monthly date day, and during the pandemic when we were all stuck inside, their date day was building a blanket fort inside their house and getting a bunch of craft supplies and making little plant terrari...

There are plenty of articles and videos that talk about caring for aging parents.  These headlines often focus on the logistical challenges of aging and navigating the healthcare system or planning for retirement or choosing when to transition parents into assisted living residences. But do you know what we don’t talk much about?  The added complexities of all of these challenges when you and your...

We love trying new things (thanks ADHD!), and since we are out there doing it anyway, we figured we would share our experiences with you and give you our perspectives together in a more organized, coordinated way.  Hopefully, anyway! So we are starting a new sub-series of Salon Confessions called Jen and Harper Try It Out . For this inaugural Jen & Harper Try It episode, Jen took me to a Harmo...

In this world of precious relationships, there is one very special category that stands on its own, and that is the family members that we choose as friends.  These are the ones who you call or text after a bad day or when you have a ridiculous story to tell.  But these are also the people who know your origin story because they were there with you.  Your sibling, your cousin, maybe an aunt or an...

It’s October, the season of Halloween, ghost stories, and mysterious, unexplainable events. In the confessional, we call that any day that ends in Y. Jen & Harper's has deepened through the years as we share stories of things that are unexplainable, metaphysical, energetically connected, and otherwise what we tend to call “woowoo.” In past episodes, we’ve talked about things like Mercury Retro...

Hey Confessionistas!  We are back AT LAST!   Way back in May, we closed out an outstanding Season 3 with promises and intentions to be back in July, and then life got LIFEY.  I mean, really, REALLY lifey.  It’s safe to say that this is a time of TRANSITION for Jen and Harper, and while that growth and transition process continues for us both, we are finally at a point where we can bring time and e...

Welcome to the Season 3 Finale of Salon Confessions Podcast!  This episode is the last episode in our Season 3 lineup before we take a break for a few weeks to get ready for Season 4.   We have explored a lot of ground this season: S3-E1: Jen & Harper share our words of the year S3-E2: A Man's Take on Midlife Dating with special guest Michael S3-E3-4: Perimenopause BS S3-E5: Travel S3-E6:...

Kay is co-host and producer of the Fuck My Work Life Podcast, and she responded to our Perimenopause series with her own confessions about Perimenopause BS.  She shared her experiences and frustrations in a letter on our "Butts and Bikinis" episode [S3:Ep9], and we asked her if she would join us in the virtual confessional for a conversation about careers, career transitions, and fucky-f...

Today, we are talking about pronouns.  Jen and Harper have a diverse circle of family and friends from all kinds of backgrounds.  We have a core belief that inclusion matters, and we stand allied with marginalized and underrepresented people across race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, gender identity, and the many other ways that people choose to identify themselves.   As allies...

Zoe is a friend of Harper's who opened up last year that she practices ENM (Ethical Non-Monogamy) while they were floating around on paddleboards one sunny evening. Her take was so informed and positive that Harper asked if she would be willing to come into The Confessional to share her experience and give us a bit of the “behind the curtain” view of how dating and relationships work in ENM, a...

In each episode of this podcast Harper goes to Jen’s nail studio, affectionately called “The Confessional” and we talk about health, beauty, and relationship topics that we think need to be more out in the open and widely discussed.  These are the things we often carry shame or fear about bringing up with others, but when we do, it’s better for everyone!  We learn from one another, we externalize...

One of Jen’s good friends and clients is Laurie.  And as Jen and Laurie were discussing menopause-related issues, Laurie shared her story about incontinence. We always assumed that age-related incontinence was mostly due to going through childbirth, and was a separate issue from hormonal changes.  Laurie really educated us about why that isn’t the case at all. In fact, stress-incontinence can be d...

Body hair!  Our culture has really wild standards about what women should do about body hair.  The beauty industry also has ever-evolving methods for removing it.  Shaving, waxing, tweezing...  Does anyone remember the Epilady?  Now we have electrolysis and laser hair removal.  What are we missing?  The list truly goes on and on.   So in this episode, we start at the top with our eyebrows, and wor...

Harper's a gel polish girl, and acrylic has always mystified Her.  So in this episode, she asks Jen a bunch of in-depth questions about what acrylic and artificial nails are, and what people should think about when getting those services. Harper's been going to Jen to get her nails done for 8 or 9 years now, and she's seen how Jen's process has evolved, and how her nails have evolv...