How to recover from a dry hair disaster

We recently had a client reach out looking for advice in looking after dry hair. She was feeling frustrated and a little bit hopeless as she said she had tried everything! She literally had a bathroom cabinet full of all of the hair products on the market promising soft, shiny, hydrated locks. But when we asked her to send us a list of exactly what she had been using, it made perfect sense why she was still struggling with dry, brittle hair.

When we look at the structure of hair under a microscope, we can see that it looks a little like a pine cone. Healthy hair will have a closed cuticle that resembles a tightly packed pine cone on the outside of the hair, this type of hair feels and looks smooth. It is the job of the cuticle to protect and maintain the inner hair cortex and its components which include moisture, lipids & protein.

Through many daily actions like: blow-drying, straitening, being exposed to harsh elements, internal heating and conventional chemical based hair products, the important cuticle can become damaged losing it’s tight, closed structure. When this happens the hair shaft resembles an open pine cone and allows loss of the essential elements from the internal hair structure. This not only leads to dry hair, but also knotty hair as the lifted, open cuticle on the surface of the hair fibres lifts and snags against each other.

So why was it that our client's collection of products were not helping to remedy her dry hair disaster?

Well, it was a few reasons really:

She continued to fry her day every other day with the straightening iron.
Her hair products were packed with harsh sulfates, silicones and other nasties that although would make her hair feel soft and lovely short term, were actually not delivering the essential ingredients her hair desperately needed to be able to recover.

Our advice to her was as follows:

Stop frying your hair with the straightening iron! For real though. Just stop. And if you absolutely ‘have to’ then you need to work even harder to help it recover.
Avoid products with silicones and the following sulfates: sodium lauryl sulfate, ammonium laureth sulfate, sodium laureth sulfate.
Restore your hair’s softness, lustre & shine by giving it moisture, lipids & protein from natural sources that it can actually utilise. We recommended she use products that contain the following ingredients:

+ Emollients to smooth down the cuticle, locking in essential nutrients to the hair cortex. There are so many wonderful natural emollients but some good ones include Shea Butter, Avocado Seed Oil, Broccoli Oil, Argan Oil & Wheat Kernel Oil.

+ Humectants to draw in water from the environment. Some names to look for on the ingredient list are Panthenol, Vitamin E & Vegetable Glycerin.

+ Moisturisers to add softness, glossiness and slip to hair fibres. We love products with Aloe vera, Cucumber extract & Wheat Protein.

After a few months of her new regime our client was super happy with her silky soft new hair & she even reported she only had to wash it once a week now as her natural scalp & hair pH and oil balance had been restored.