Stop Damaging Your Hair! Follow These Simple Tips for Hair Preservation

by Alexandra Kilpatrick

Hair grows when it’s healthy, but if we damage our locks enough, our hair stops growing back the way we want it to.

Elizabeth Cunnane Phillips of New York Philip Kingsley Trichological Clinic commented to Refinery29 that women tend to think about their hair externally.

“We’re not conditioned to think about it as being a barometer of our health,” Phillips told Refinery29. However, it turns out that it is not simply our curling irons that are damaging our luscious locks.

Refinery29 spoke with a handful of experts to get to the root of the problem. Read on to learn the surprising habits that are destroying our hair on a daily basis from the inside out.

Skipping breakfast

“The body considers hair to be a nonessential tissue,” Phillips told Refinery29. “So, when you avoid putting nutrients in your body in the morning, you’re starting the day in a deficit.”

Skipping breakfast will cause hair to shed and grow more slowly, to a greater degree if you skip breakfast every day. The best solution is to begin each day with protein and a complex carbohydrate in order to make sure that your hair gets what it needs to thrive.

Irresponsible vegetarianism

Becoming a vegetarian is admirable, but it’s necessary to remember to maintain a well balanced diet, including amino acids.

“People think that vegetarianism is automatically healthier,” Phillips told Refinery29. “It’s not that simple, though.”

If you do decide to go vegetarian, make sure you’re not leaving anything out of your diet, like protein. Otherwise, you might find yourself losing more hair in the shower.

Juice cleanses

“Women often come to me and say, ‘I’ve never been this healthy in my life – but my hair is shedding,’” Phillips told Refinery29. “I’ll ask them what their journey to healthiness was and they will very frequently say that they did a juice cleanse.”

A juice cleanse actually deprives the body of nutrients, much like skipping breakfast. Phillips commented to Refinery29 that since your body doesn’t know when it’s getting its next nutrient, it delays supplying nutrients to the hair, leading to hair loss. A consistently healthy and well balanced diet is the perfect alternative to a juice cleanse.

Over-drying

It’s well known that overusing heat styling tools leads to unhealthy hair, but we weren’t sure why. It turns out that blowdrying your hair from wet to dry is not the problem but rather taking it to over-dry. Those last few minutes of blowdrying cause the most hair damage and dehydration.

“Hair is a very strong fiber and can take this sort of drying about once a week,” Phillips told Refinery29. “But, if you’re over-drying all the time, you’re cumulatively damaging it and creating a vulnerability that will lead to breakage.”

Skipping trims

Even if you’re growing your hair out, Phillips advises getting a quarter-inch trim every eight weeks to improve the strength, health and integrity of your hair. Not trimming your hair means longer but stringy and damaged locks.

Tight ponytails

Phillips commented to Refinery29 that the soreness associated with a day in a tight ponytail means the pony is too tight for the hair follicles, creates vulnerability to the hair around the temples.

“You can get away with it for a couple of years, but it’s not something you’ll be thrilled about in your 30s and 40s, when subtle changes occur,” Phillips told Refinery29.

Brushing the roots

We tend to go for a top-to-bottom approach when brushing our hair, but Sean James Deceurs, stylist at New York City’s Rita Hazan Salon, commented to Refinery29 that this habit actually leads to faster breakage.

“If you have a lot of knots, when you brush from the roots down, you are brushing those knots into each other and tightening them,” Deceurs told Refinery29. Easy solution? Start from the bottom and work your way up.

Scalp denial

“If your scalp is dry and itchy beyond a couple of days or a week, you need to do something about it,” Phillips told Refinery29. “When your skin doesn’t feel good, it means it needs something. Studies show that even the mildest form of dandruff contributes to shedding.”

Easy fix? Use a dandruff shampoo, like Klorane’s Soothing Shampoo with Peony Extract.

Hair dye after a keratin treatment

Hairstylist Bethany Brill warned to Refinery29 that coloring your hair after a keratin treatment is a huge mistake.

“The keratin will change the porosity of your hair,” Brill told Refinery29. “So, if you’re going darker, it’ll oversaturate the color. And if you’re going lighter, it’ll just damage it like crazy. It’s damage on damage.”

Straightening without combing

“Using a flat iron without a comb directly in front of the flat iron as you pull the iron down the hair definitely causes breakage,” Deceurs told Refinery29. “It’ll make your hair look frizzy and dry.”

To avoid breakage, simply use a comb and straighten the hair as you comb through each section.

Not enough iron

Iron is essential for hair growth and not getting enough of it leads to hair shedding.

“Your system will operate okay without enough iron,” Phillips told Refinery29. “You might not feel totally great, but we all have ways we like to explain that away. However, hair will frequently suffer without sufficient iron. It won’t seem like it’s making an impact until one day it does.”

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