Do You Color Or Heat Your Hair?
Whether you are giving your hair some highlights or perming your locks, the treatments can have a big effect on the long term quality of your hair.
Many hair stylists and health professionals agree that providing sometime between treatments may give your hair a much needed break to recuperate after each hair style.
When perming or ironing your hair, you essentially fry the cuticle all the way down to the hair cortex (or inner tube where the true color of your hair lies.) Applying heat on a regular basis loosens the hair scales, curling them up. This may temporarily seem like a good thing because your hair seems fuller. However, in reality each scale that lifts up due to repeated heat applications becomes a potential point at which to start an ugly split end!
Also, the frying of your hair for hairstyling purposes also burns off the essential oils that your hair needs to maintain its luster and natural protection against split ends. The excess perming, ironing, and chemical treatments signals to the sebaceous gland that it needs to produce more oils to make up the difference. The increased oil production can clog pores and lead to build up on the scalp, causing dandruff.
Also the excess production of oils can lead to foul smelling scalps because excess oil and dandruff creates an explosion of your bacterial micro flora – which everyone has. A balanced micro flora allows for an optimal scalp condition, very little dandruff, and great looking hair (not to mention an absence of foul scalp odor).
If you have the mentioned conditions, here is what to do:
Give your hair a rest: If you’re perming, heating, ironing daily or even weekly, stop for awhile (it’s hard for me to say when, because it depends on the condition your hair is currently in.) Whatever the condition, allow your hair to grow a couple of inches before you pick right back up again.
Shampoo your hair with a cleansing shampoo without fragrances. There are some really inexpensive ones on the market right now. Do this every other day, allowing your hair to breath and produce its own oils.
If you need to heat your hair, first towel dry half way. Then blow dry or iron.
You can try a leave in conditioner but try to choose a less greasy one. Remember, you’re also trying to rid yourself of that foul scalp odor too and doing that requires that we try and balance out the micro flora on your scalp. This means a reduction in build-up of product, dandruff, dried shampoo and conditioners.
You should consider taking a hair fortifying supplement that will strengthen the core of the hair as well as provide optimal support to the cuticle (the outer layer – which we see) and the follicle, which is where the hair “factory” resides.
