Healthy hair –whether it’s black, curled, blonde, short, or long –adds to the overall beauty of your body. If your hair is messed up or looks like the owner passed some decades ago, you’ll give a negative impression to people.
As a lady, you need to take good care of your hair. And if it’s damaged, follow the best practices discussed in this post to bring back your pride. Before we hop on these hair tips, let’s look at some common types of hair damage.
Common Types of Hair Damage
Split Ends:
This is when hair ends in frays or some branches due to the damage in the outermost layer of hair called the cuticle.
Breakage:
This is when the shafts of the hair start to slit and become ragged instead of growing normally.
Dull:
Due to using harsh shampoos and the wrong tools, hair may look dry with no shine or moisture.
Thinning:
This is excessive loss of hair. It’s normal for hair to drop. But if you lose beyond 100 hairs a day, that’s probably thinning.
Lack of Elasticity:
Hair is elastic to some extent. If your hair behaves like a piece of wire, it’s damaged.
Over-Processed:
This is the same as chemical damage. This is when hair shafts become porous, dense, and hard to style due to excessive treatment or chemicals.
Note: There is also mechanical damage, heat damage, and chemical damage
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What are the Best Hair Care Tips to Grow Back Damaged Hair
1. Avoid Daily Washing
Your body needs a shower or a bath at least once a day. For this reason, some women wash their hair using the same routine. This practice is a huge mistake for your hair.
Hair often needs to stay moisturized by its natural oil. When you wash your hair daily, these natural oils are removed leaving your hair dry. And by now, you should know that dryness is very unhealthy for your hair.
A dry scalp can lead to excessive hair loss as the roots of your hair become very weak. A sky skin is also prone to various infections, and skin infections will cause serious hair loss as well.
To maintain your hair or bring back your lost hair, you need to wash your hair at most twice a week. This means that you should limit the activities that will demand that you wash your hair.
2. Limit Chlorine Exposure
Do you like to go out a couple of times per week to swim? If YES, that can be one of the reasons why your hair is taking longer than usual to grow.
The swimming pool water is full of chlorine. Chlorine is a cleaning substance as such it will get rid of all the natural oil in your hair.
Continuous exposure to chlorine can lead to discoloration of your hair and weakening of the hair strands which result in split ends.
3. Pay Attention to the Temperature of the hot hair tools
We all know that hot hair tools can cause severe damage to chemically treated hair. However, at some point even with natural hair, we can’t leave without some hot hair tools.
That’s where this tip comes in. You need to use tools with adjustable temperatures. And make sure to use the hair dryers, hair straighteners, curling iron, curling brush, and straightening brush at a moderate or low temperature when using them.
4. Eat Healthily
The other easy tip that will reduce further hair loss and maintain damaged hair is eating healthily. A healthy diet is advantageous to your hair in many ways.
A diet with nutritious foods can lead to healthy hair. Minerals and vitamins like Biotin (vitamin B7), Iron, Vitamin C, Vitamin D, and Zinc play a very important role in hair growth, and hair maintenance and lead to strong and healthy hair.
Here are some of the sources of these minerals and nutrients.
Biotin is found in abundance in the following foods: egg yolk, whole grain, and meat.
You can find Iron in food like legumes, red meat, and leafy greens.
Vitamin C is found in large quantities in citrus fruits and green vegetables.
Apart from the sunlight which we avoid, you can also get Vitamin D in fatty fish and some supplements.
5. Avoid Excessive Chemicals
Just like some hot tools, we cannot live without some hair chemicals. Hair shampoos, hair moisturizers, artificial hair oils, and hair creams are all chemically-processed products.
Again, we can’t live without all chemical hair products. However, you need to take your time to read the ingredients and make sure it doesn’t contain chemicals in your hair.
Hair products that contain the following ingredients need to be avoided: sulfates (Ammonia Laurel Sulfate/ Sodium Laurel Sulfate), Parabens, Diethanolamine, Triethanolamine, Alcohol (propanol and isopropyl), formaldehyde, silicone, etc.
Note: it’s almost impossible to find hair products that are free of all these. You need to make sure that these chemicals are not in abundance.
6. Wash in Lukewarm Water
The way you wash your hair has a great impact on hair growth and hair maintenance. Washing your hair with very cold water or hot water is bad for your hair.
Lukewarm water is the best water temperature for your hair. Warm water helps to open up hair cuticles and scalp pores which is healthy for your hair.
Plus, Lukewarm water helps to activate the cleaners in most shampoos making sure they perform the best on your hair.
7. Find Good Products
To bring back your lost hair or maintain your current hair, you have to know the best products for your hair. This should be a no-brainer: you need to find products that work best for your hair.
You can find these products by trying what’s already working for others. Of course, what worked for someone does not guarantee the best work for you too. Experiment and find products that suit your hair and scalp.
And when you find some good products, stick to them.
Here are two products you can try on your hair as they work best for most people.
The Mane Choice: it’s a sulfate-free and paraben-free product that repairs breakage and split ends.
Mielle Organics Avocado Hair Milk: it revives dry and thirsty hair by providing them with hydration and moisture.
8. Use quality tools
Yes, hands and fingers are God-given tools for taking care of your hair. However, some sophisticated tools can work wonders when it comes to repairing damaged hair.
Making use of some quality tools wouldn’t be bad for your hair. Here are some powerful tools that will save your hair.
Sheila Stotts Application Brush
Earth Therapeutics Natural-Bristle Cushion Brush
Note: some hot tools also work wonders. Just don’t forget tip number 3: make sure you’re using them at low temperatures.
9. Add Oil before Washing
Next time you want to wash your hair, add some Coconut oil or Sesame oil before pouring water or any chemical into your hair. This will make sure your hair is hydrated and frizz-free.
Applying oil before washing your hair helps to prevent hair loss. Oil coats and moisturizes your hair and scalp. This protects the scalp and hair from harmful chemical ingredients in the shampoo and pollution.
10. Brush Before Washing
Comb or brush my hair before showering? I thought we brush our hair after a shower. You ask.
Well, you need to free your knots and brush your hair before getting into a shower. After-wash brushing is another thing. Here I’m talking about before-shower brushing.
Brushing your hair creates spaces in your hair where shampoo and conditioners need to get in and perform their duties. This ensures easy penetration and circulation of the shampoo and conditioners.
Brush your hair and apply the Coconut oil then get into the shower. You’ll thank me later.
11. Don’t Brush or Comb Wet Hair
While still on the subject of brushing, if your hair is more than six inches long, you should never comb or brush it in its wet state. Brushing wet hair may work with short hair, but it’s a no-go with long and curly hair.
Hair’s most fragile state is when it’s wet. The strands are not very strong when they’re wet and they can easily break or get uprooted when brushing it.
You need to wait for it to air-dry and brush it. This way, the brush will be strong and you’ll minimize a lot of hair loss.
12. Add Protective Oil before Hot drying
Is hot drying badly for hair? The wrong hot drying is very damaging to your air. I mean hot drying at very high temperatures and over-drying the hair.
These can cause brittleness, breakage, dullness, and dryness. Unprotected hot drying is bad for your hair. It burns and breaks the outer layer of the cuticles which contain lipids. This can lead to frizz as the hair will no longer be water-repelling.
Grapeseed oil is a great heat protectant that you can apply to your hair before hot drying it. It protects your hair from up to 420 degrees of heat. Apply it every time you want or are in a rush and want to use hot drying.
13. Get Regular Trims
If you’ve got spilled ends in your hair, you should get regular trims of the hair tips. Just a recap, Split ends hair is the one that looks frayed, brittle, and dry at the ends.
There are a couple of types of hair slips. Baby slips, tree splits, and feature splits are some good examples.
The obvious way to prevent or control the widespread split ends is to trim the tips of your hair every three months or so. This will ensure the even and healthy growth of your hair.
14. Sleep on Silk Pillows
Although silk pillowcase does not directly lead to hair growth, it’s so beneficial to your skin and hair.
As I mention in THIS POST, silk materials are very soft and tender. While cotton pillowcases may leave some wool on your hair and some pressed lines on your face, this is not the case with a silk pillowcase.
The soft materials in the silk cloth help to reduce friction between your hair and your pillowcase. This will further reduce the movement of hair on the scalp which prevents hair loss.
Silk also retains moisture. As a result, your hair will be moisturized throughout the night.
15. Use Alcohol-Free Shampoo
Alcohol is a drying agent, and its presence in hair products has an obvious disadvantage. It sucks and dries the scalp making it brittle and dull.
Why then do the hair products companies include them? Well, alcohol finds its way into most hair products –especially hair sprays –because of its ability to hold the shape of your hairstyle.
However, it’s not all alcohols that are harmful to your hair. Some alcohols may not harmful to your strands.
Alcohol is divided into two categories: short-chain alcohol and long-chain alcohol. The short-chain alcohols include ethanol, SD alcohol, propanol, and isopropyl.
These alcohols are moisture suckers because they have few carbon atoms in them. As a result, they evaporate faster than the long-chain ones. They take moisture with them as they evaporate.
As a general rule of thumb, make sure you use a shampoo that is alcohol-free.
16. Gentle Washing & Massaging
The next tip has to do with the way you wash your hair and massage your scalp. Whenever you’re doing these two you need to make sure you don’t apply too much pressure on the scalp.
The top layer of your scalp contains some lipids which moisturize your strands. When you massage your scalp, you provoke glands to produce more sebum which leads to hair growth.
On the contrary, when you over-scratch or massage your hair, you create disorder in the layers of the hair follicle which leads to poor hair growth.
17. Use a soft towel
After washing your hair, you need to use a fine towel to absorb moisture from it. Instead of rubbing your hair vigorously with a rough towel, put a fine semi-wet towel around your hair and let it absorb the water from your hair.
You can use an old cotton t-shirt or a microfiber towel. Leave the towel on your hair for some minutes before removing it to let the hair dry with air.
If you’re in hurry, you can use the hot blower. However, just make pay attention to the temperature level.
18. See a professional/ doctor
As stated above, most skin infections cause hair loss if they are on your scalp. Whenever you see the signs of any skin disease, you need to see a skin doctor.
Some of the infections that cause hair loss include (WebMD) ringworm, folliculitis, piedra (trichomycosis nodularis), seborrheic dermatitis, and more.
Similarly, if you can’t manage to apply some treatments, trim your hair or wash your hair, you should see a professional. Instead of relying on tutorials online, take some time to visit a hairdresser and you’ll feel great about your hair and beauty.
Final Words on Hair Care Tips
Some ladies come up with so many excuses as to why they’re not attending to their hair. Some claim that they have no money and others blame it on lack of time.
While it’s true that some hair products require money, you can find a hair care routine and style that suits your budget. And the goodness is that some hair care routines don’t cost you money.
You just need to know what to do to avoid repairing damaged hair or maintaining healthy hair. This post contains tons of these tips.
If you’re a busy girl, know what to avoid putting in your hair and what’s best for your hair. And you probably know that being busy is a game of priorities. Don’t prioritize work or other stuff at the expense of your beauty.
Take a couple of minutes of your day to implement some of the tips discussed in this post.
And if you’ve tried the above tips without seeing positive results, maybe it’s time you try out cute nails. Here is a full post consisting of 30 cute nail ideas.
Ciao!
