
Your hair is more than just your ‘crowning glory’, it’s an integral part of how you feel about yourself. In fact, almost 80 percent of women claim that their personal outlook is influenced by their hair.
When your hair doesn’t look good, it’s hard to feel good. And once a bad hair day starts to affect how you feel about yourself, no amount of dry shampoo or clever styling tricks can help.
Instead, we should be focusing on how to make your hair healthy from within. Only this can give us the kind of hair that looks and feels amazing, making us feel great about ourselves from top to toe. And, while this might sound easier said than done, the good news is that healthy hair is only a few small changes away.
Want to know more? Read on to find out how to get healthy hair!
Take Hair-Boosting Vitamins
Before we get into the best products or practices, one of the most effective ways to make your hair beautiful and healthy is to follow a nutritious diet. That said, we know that it’s not easy to get all the vitamins and minerals you need for healthy hair, and especially if you have certain food intolerances or follow a vegan diet.
Luckily, it’s possible to supplement your diet with SugarBearHair vitamins, which are specially designed to boost the health of your hair from within. But does SugarBearHair really work?
It might sound hard to believe that these delicious berry-flavored chewy vitamins could also be good for your hair but it’s true! Thanks to their unique combination of hair-friendly vitamins like folic acid, vitamin D, and biotin, they help to support your hair goals for optimal growth and shine.
What’s more, they’re cruelty-free and contain no gluten, dairy, hormones, or gelatin. This means that everyone can benefit from their hair-boosting power without having to worry about how they affect facial and body hair or whether they compromise certain dietary restrictions.
Protect Your Scalp
Most of us spend a lot of time and money caring for our skin but ignore the skin on our heads altogether. If your goal is beautiful and healthy hair, this is a big mistake since healthy hair can only grow from a healthy scalp.
Even if scalp dryness isn’t an issue for you, maintaining a healthy scalp can help ensure that it never becomes one, while also helping you to achieve even glossier hair.
Looking after your scalp helps you break the cycle of needing dry shampoo to mask oily roots by getting rid of the resulting product build-up and limiting excess oil. What’s more, looking after your scalp also promotes hair growth for the long and luscious locks you’ve always wanted.
Give your scalp the attention it needs with a weekly scalp mask. Look for detoxifying ingredients such as salicylic acid to unblock pores and relieve irritation. Adding a resistance serum to your hair care collection also helps protect your scalp against environmental aggressors.
Another way to promote a healthy scalp is to apply a prebiotic scalp serum the night before you plan to wash your hair. This will help regulate sebum production to minimize dandruff and stop your hair from getting greasy between washes without reducing shine.
Wash Less Often
That’s right, one of the best tips for healthier hair is to take the lazy option and skip the shampoo for another day or two.
When your hair gets wet it swells from the inside, forcing the cuticle up. The more this happens, the more likely you are to experience breakage and frizz. Aim to wash your hair every other day at most, although less often is even better.
This thought might horrify you if your unwashed hair is prone to greasiness or tends to look flat. But trust us, this will become less of an issue once you start looking after your scalp. In the meantime, swap your daily wash for dry shampoo at least once a week for noticeable long-term benefits.
Brush Before Washing
Wondering what to do to keep your hair healthy when you do need to wash it? Brush it before you step into the shower.
Wet hair is more vulnerable to breakage, meaning that brushing your hair during or after washing can do some serious damage to already weakened hair. Getting out the knots before you wash your hair also means you’ll use less conditioner and spend less time in the shower, saving on water too.
Another bonus of brushing your hair before washing it is that this helps distribute your scalp’s natural oils down to the ends of your hair, giving you a glossier post-wash look.
Turn Down the Water Temperature
A hot, steamy shower might feel soothing and relaxing but it’s bad news for your skin and your scalp. Hot water acts as an irritant to your scalp and may weaken your hair as it grows.
Aim for a water temperature that’s warm but not hot. Then, at the end of your shower, rinse your hair with cold water to seal the cuticles and boost shine.
Hold Back on the Shampoo
Less is more when it comes to how much shampoo you need to maintain the cleanliness of healthy hair. First, make sure your hair is completely wet before applying any shampoo. This ensures that a small amount of shampoo goes a long way.
When you’re ready to wash, work a dime-sized amount of shampoo into your scalp, making sure not to apply any shampoo to the ends of your hair. Using more shampoo than necessary doesn’t make your hair any cleaner. Instead, it dries out your hair by removing all the essential oils that help keep it nourished and shiny.
Always Use Conditioner
You might not realize it but conditioners do a lot more than smooth down frizz for softer, shinier hair. Using a conditioner is also the best way to protect your hair before heat styling. In fact, they work even better than heat-protectant sprays to coat the hair.
If you use heat styling a lot, make sure to use a conditioner with hair-coating ingredients such as dimethicone or polyquaternium. And, for the best results, leave the conditioner on for at least five minutes then only rinse it off with cool water to ensure more residual conditioner remains on the hair.
Rethink How You Dry Your Hair
The methods you use to dry your hair also have a big impact on how healthy it looks.
One of the best tips for healthier hair is to swap your towels for t-shirts. Wrapping and blotting your hair with a soft cotton t-shirt is far better for your hair than a heavy towel. The result will be smoother and healthier-looking hair since t-shirts minimize the amount of pressure put on the hair cuticles.
Once you’ve got the majority of the water out, try and leave your hair to air dry for as long as you can. Ideally, you should skip the blowout altogether and leave your hair to dry naturally as a way to minimize damage. One way to do this is to wash your hair in the evening before putting it in two loose braids and leaving it to dry overnight.
But, if that’s not possible, getting out a good amount of water from just-washed hair helps speed up the time you’ll need for a blowout no end. As a result, you’ll expose your hair to less heat and cause less damage to your hair follicles.
Get Regular Trims
If Rapunzel-like locks are your goal, you’d be wrong to avoid getting regular trims. It might sound counterproductive but trimming your damaged ends helps encourage healthy hair growth from the roots. The result will be softer, more flexible hair that is less prone to knots and breakage.
Ideally, you should get short hair trimmed every four to eight weeks, while long hairstyles can usually hold out up to 12 weeks between trims. If you’ve got long hair and are feeling brave enough you could even trim your own hair. It’s a lot easier than you might think, and especially if you have wavy or curly hair where a little unevenness on the ends won’t notice.
How to Make Your Hair Healthy
Understanding how to make your hair healthy can often go against the practices we’ve come to consider as essential for maintaining clean, stylish, and healthy hair. As these tips for healthier hair show, over-washing, towel-drying, and daily blowouts inflict a lot of damage on our hair on a regular basis.
But, with small changes, from getting the right hair-boosting nutrients to taking steps to care for your hair from the scalp down, it’s possible to achieve the beautiful and healthy hair you’ve always wanted.
For more of the latest tech news and lifestyle tips, be sure to check out our other blog posts!
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