Tips for Desert-Dry Hair
If your hair is like mine, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about when I say ‘desert-dry’ hair. If your hair is just a lil bit dry, you may benefit from some tips from this as well, but this is mainly geared toward those whose hair could basically be dunked in a vat of olive oil and still be parched 10 seconds later.
Don’t wash your hair every day, and wash it as least often as possible (like, go without washing until you feel like you really should because it either smells bad or just needs some refreshing or w/e).
When you do wash your hair, do everything like normal except at the very end of your shower, when you’re rinsing out your conditioner, stop about 30 seconds to a minute before you normally would. This step will ensure that a little bit of the conditioner you used during your shower will remain in your hair instead of it being ‘squeaky clean,’ and the reason for this is that the remaining conditioner will act like a leave-in conditioner for your hair, providing extra hydration and nourishment that you otherwise wouldn’t get if you had washed it all out. People without seriously dry hair might be taken aback by this step because, for them, leaving some conditioner remnants behind would likely weigh their hair down and make it look dull by the time it’s dried. However, for those of us with super thirsty strands, leaving just this tiny bit of conditioner in our hair won’t make such a drastic difference since our hair is so dry that it’s eager to soak up the extra conditioner quickly so there won’t be anything left to weigh the hair down or give it a dull effect.
Use scrunchies or just wear your hair down instead of using harsh materials to tie your hair up. Using, for example, a rubber band to hold up your ponytail first of all won’t look very cute, and second, it will grab and pull at your delicate dry individual hairs, promoting breakage and split-ends when that’s the last thing we want.
Avoid heat-styling your hair (altogether if possible, or just as much as you can manage). Every time you use heat, even if you use a heat protection spray, you risk doing even more damage to your already vulnerable hair, and the heat will also dry out your hair even more than it already is!
Get your hair cut or trimmed regularly. This ensures that the place with the most breakage and damage – the ends – won’t have as much of a chance to continue to get damaged further and further – when a strand of hair is broken, it can’t be ‘repaired,’ so the only way to get rid of broken pieces is to cut your hair above where the breakage is. If you don’t cut it, you’re just allowing the broken pieces continue to break farther up the strand of hair which will mean that you’ll have to get a shorter cut next time to remove the damage or that the broken pieces will break completely off because they’ve been so neglected that they got too damaged and dehydrated and weren’t able to even hold on as a thin piece of broken hair anymore.