Personal Care: At-Home Tips for Healthy, Beautiful Hair
Personal Care > At-Home Tips for Healthy, Beautiful Hair
The bad hair day - We’ve all been there, done that. Flip through the selection of women’s magazines while you’re in line at the grocery store and you’re bound to find an article in at least one of them offering cover-up solutions like wearing a hat, directions for how to style your hair on a bad day that are supposed to be “simple” to arrange but often involve creating a complex network of braids and pony-tail twists with nothing but a few bobby pins and hair clips, and suggestions for hair products that will calm flyaways, fluff up “flat” hair, and coax even the curliest manes into gentle waves.
But what about engaging in some preventive measures? Plenty of strategies are simple and available in your own home for a fraction of the cost of salon products. Also, there are at-home remedies that may surprise you for curing greasy-looking hair, visible roots, and dry, brittle ends. Read on for some thrifty personal care tips just for hair.
Start with Some Prevention
First of all, avoid doing things to your hair that will exacerbate the occurrence of a bad hair day. Perms are the number-one enemy of healthy hair, say hair care experts. Perming your hair wreaks havoc on the follicles by breaking them down and weakening them, resulting in damaged, brittle strands more prone to looking dull, drab, and lifeless. Public enemy number two, as far as your hair is concerned, is getting it colored. Coloring processes strip the hair follicle, again leaving your hair weakened and brittle. If you both perm and color-treat your hair, be aware that this combination is the most damaging situation. If your personal care routine for your hair happens to include perming/and or coloring, consider giving one up. Talk to your stylist for solutions. Many salons these days have adopted the mission statement of promoting healthy hair and avoiding damaging processes such as perming, abandoning this method in favor of a body-building haircut, appropriate shampoo and conditioning regimens, and achieving waves and curls with curling irons or hair-friendly soft
If you wear bangs (which, thanks to last year’s runway models, movie stars, and television actresses have made a comeback – think of Jennifer Aniston on “Friends” last year, Jennifer Gardner on the red carpet, and most of the women in the cast of the hit show “The O.C.”), keep in mind that they require maintenance to avoid shagginess. While this article includes tips for at-home hair remedies, it must be stated that cutting your own bangs is not recommended. This has resulted in disaster for too many women out there. Some hair salons are beginning to offer free bang-trimming for regular clients, according to one owner.
Maintain Hair Health
Some types of hair do not need to be shampooed everyday; overwashing your hair can result in more rapid onset of frayed ends. Usually, people with thick or coarse hair can skip a day without getting a “greasy” appearance, while those with fine and/or thin hair may be more prone to greasy hair if they do not shampoo daily. Regularly conditioning your hair is the best way to keep it shiny, smooth, and less likely to give you a bad hair day. Conditioner available at grocery and drug stores will do the trick just fine for every-day needs, hair care experts say. When hair gets extra-dry and split, or you just have to make it that one more week until your next trim, try this at-home recipe for a deep condition: Dampen your hair and slather it with conditioner from roots to end. Wrap it in a plastic bag or saran rap. Moisten a towel with warm water and wrap it around the plastic-wrapped hair. Leave this treatment on for a while – during housework, T.V. watching, or even –and then rinse.
Bad Hair-Day Help
Even if you stick to a good hair-care regimen as described above, you’re still going to have those days when you oversleep and don’t have enough time to wash it, or static takes over. For a fast-fix to prevent greasy-looking hair, rub baking soda into it. Baking soda absorbs oil and is a great dry shampoo substitute. Comb the baking soda out. Another time-saving solution is to just wash your bangs and roots in “dirtiest” part of your hair, and blow dry.
Static can be cured by combing hair spray through your hair or even spraying with an aerosol static prevention spray. Keep an anti-static dryer sheet in your purse and rub it over your hair to cut down on fly-aways throughout the day.
Finally, what about those unsightly roots? Touch them up (only the roots around your face) with a mascara or an eyebrow pencil in a matching color. Quick fixes for a bad hair day – which is inevitable for everyone – do not have to be complicated, expensive, or result in hat-head hair.