How to Keep Your Hair Healthy: 7 Steps for Beautiful Hair
Learn the secrets to scoring healthy hair.
You may be wondering how to keep your hair healthy, especially while feeling challenged by the weather, dryness or frizz, or even just the natural texture of your hair. You want beautiful and healthy hair, but there are just some things that can get in the way of achieving that. Rethinking your hair care routine and some lifestyle choices may help you get one step closer to the beautiful hair you’re picturing. Seriously, it is that easy to get healthy-looking, beautiful hair!
How to Keep Your Hair Healthy: The Basics
Read to discover your new healthy hair care regimen:
Healthy hair has normal porosity. If you spritz water on your strands and it doesn’t bead up (low-porosity) or soak-in (high-porosity), you’ve got healthy, beautiful hair. If you have normal porosity hair, you want to look for systems designed for normal to dry hair (healthy hair), as you don’t need a lot of conditioning. You might try Dove Oxygen Moisture Shampoo. As always, it is important to get the right product for your hair type. The right products make it easy to have healthy hair.
“Fine hair does not need heavy conditioning, while coarse, curly hair does,” Unilever’s Senior Hair Manager, Leon Van-Gorkom, explains.
1. Use the right wash and care system.
The easiest thing that we all can do to get healthy, beautiful hair is to use a wash and care system that’s designed for our hair type. Hair health starts when you use your shampoo and condition as a unit to ensure maximum benefits to your hair.
According to Leon-van Gorkom, Personal Care NA at Unilever, “Using a good conditioning shampoo and conditioner will help you avoid breakage and replenish hair. Plus, conditioning agents on the hair can make it smooth and shiny.”
Try the Suave Professionals Coconut Milk Infusion Deep Moisture Shampoo and the Suave Professionals Coconut Milk Infusion Deep Moisture Conditioner. These formulas work to deliver deep moisture to your hair, which can seriously help out dry locks and turn damaged locks into gorgeous hair.
2. Use a gentle brush.
Hair is susceptible to breakage at all times, but especially when it’s wet. Make sure that you towel-dry your hair and then use a leave-in conditioner or a detangling spray. Then, use a gentle comb or brush (we adore the boar bristle brush) as you work from the ends up to the roots.
Remember the old advice to get beautiful hair, brush your hair one hundred times? When you use, the right brush is one step on how to keep hair healthy. And no, you really don’t really need to brush your hair one hundred times to get beautiful hair.
3. Use a hair mask.
If your hair is damaged, dull, or broken down, you’ll also need a hair mask to help you out. These heavy-duty and thick conditioners work to penetrate and restore the hair from within (much like a facial mask does for your skin). Be sure to leave your mask on for the suggested time and incorporate your hair mask into your routine at least once a week for the best results.
4. Avoid heat styling as much as possible.
This one can be really tough, but the reality is heat styling is damaging and can cause your hair to split, break, and look unhealthy. If healthy hair is your goal, you’ll need to avoid heat styling (blow dryers, flat irons, curling wands, etc) at all costs, or at least save them for special occasions. When you do blow-dry your strands, make sure that you apply a heat protectant. For beautiful hair, always use a low setting on your dryer, and don’t place the heat directly on your hair. Who knows, you may even get used to not depending on your beloved dryer every day!
5. Avoid the sun.
Just like you are avoiding unnatural heat, you’ll have to be wary of the damaging effects of the heat from the sun. In the summer, rock a stylish summer hat and take breaks from the sun as much as possible.
6. Use hair serums
According to Leon, “The different seasons will have a different impact depending on your hair’s porosity.” If you have damaged hair with a low porosity, it may frizz much more quickly than normal porosity hair types. However, don’t think you’re exempt from a frizzy situation. Healthy hair (normal porosity) hair types should still utilize styling products like serums or hair oils to tame or prevent frizz. Now, the seasons can’t stop you from having beautiful hair 24-7.
6. Try not to dye your hair.
If you color your hair every other season (or even more often than that), this will be bad news for you to absorb. While your hair dye revives your look, it also damages and breaks your strands. If you want healthy hair, you’ll have to stop dyeing it or go way lighter by maybe trying a few strands of balayage or highlights only over the summer months. We know it’s hard, but you can do it!
7. Stay away from straighteners.
Brazilian, keratin, Japanese –you’ve done them all in your quest for the most perfect strands. Like the hair dyes, some straighteners do contain chemicals that can wreck havoc on the hair. However, according to Van Gorkom, “not all chemical straighteners are necessarily bad.” Be sure to check the ingredients and talk to your stylist about what they contain.
With these 7 tips for healthier hair, you’ll be one step closer to even more beautiful strands in no time.
