Being a professional hairstylist that specializes in healthy hair, I get a lot of clients who have damaged hair. For these women, getting a hair care routine customized to treat damaged hair is essential in nursing the hair back to health. Many times the hair is not as damaged as it seems but there are times when drastic measures are needed.
In order to develop a hair care routine for damaged hair, you must first determine what caused the damage in the first place. Some common causes of damage are:
- chemicals (relaxers and/or color) to often
- too much heat
- too much tension (from braiding and/or ponytails)
- doing your own chemical services
- avoiding trims
If you are doing anything damaging to your hair you must immediately stop in order to get your hair back on track. If you start treating your hair but do not stop the damaging practices, you are only putting a band aid on the problem instead of actually fixing it. For example, if you flat iron your hair every day and begin to see breakage and an increased amount of shedding, doing deep conditioners every week (even using by L. Jones products) will not help you if you don't stop the excessive flat ironing. So, step one is immediately stop doing what is damaging your hair.
Step two is to then begin to nurse your hair back to health. Damaged hair means that the hair is lacking protein, moisture, or both. If your hair is extremely dry, you are lacking moisture (the by L. Jones "dry hair bundle" can help with this). If your hair is very brittle and you have a lot of breakage, you are lacking protein (the by L. Jones Protein & Strengthening Collection can help with this). If your hair is dry AND breaking, then your hair is lacking protein AND moisture.
Healthy hair has an equal balance of moisture & protein so in order to get your damaged hair back healthy, you would need to start a weekly regimen of either alternating protein treatments and deep conditioners, or you could do weekly reconstructive treatments. Reconstructive treatments (like this one) include both protein and moisture so your hair gets the best of both worlds in one product. Do this every week for at least one month in order to start seeing results.
The next thing you want to do to make your damaged hair healthy again is to take a break from the heat. Heat is fine on healthy hair when used correctly, but on damaged hair it can make matters even worse so stick to non-heat styles when you are getting your hair back healthy. Also be sure to have a professional trim in order to get all of the split ends and even up any of your hair that is uneven as a result of being damaged.
So, your routine for getting damaged hair back healthy should look like this:
- week 1- stop all damaging practices, get a trim/cut from a professional, remove direct heat from your routine, and do a reconstructive treatment.
- week 2- continue to remove heat, do another reconstructive treatment
- week 3- continue with no-heat styles, do another reconstructive treatment
- week 4- refrain from heat again, do another reconstructive treatment
- every week after- once you see improvement, you can then begin doing reconstructive treatments every 2 weeks instead of weekly. refrain from heat until your hair gets back to a healthy state.
- continue to get trims every 3 months.
Remember that you didn't cause the damage to your hair in one day, so it will take more than one day for it to get back to it's healthy state. Also be sure to use high quality hair products (like these) to get your hair back healthy.
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