2024 Guide to Having Healthy Hair
Our modern world offers women unprecedented access to an exciting array of beauty products and trends. Lining the shelves at your favorite beauty store are curling wands, relaxers, dyes, heat tools, hairpieces, accessories, laser bands, growth serums, clay masks, leave-ins, dry shampoos, conditioners — and that’s just the shortlist. Like most things in the 21st century, ease and convenience have a tricky underbelly inciting long-term effects. Essentially, the products and gadgets we grab daily to primp our hair and achieve a desired look can damage the hair follicles, strip the scalp of nutrients, and ultimately turn our locks into flat, un-stylable bits. Worse, our patterns can create dry scalp, dandruff, inflammation, and in some cases, alopecia.
While we style our hair, we’re beckoning it to remain healthy despite exposure to heat, chemicals, tension, and environmental toxins that have adverse effects.
Is it possible to achieve hair health in this ever-demanding beauty landscape?
You bet! Getting healthy hair is attainable, and you don’t have to cast aside your routine or drink witch oil and sacrifice your firstborn. If you’re wondering how to have healthy hair, no matter how damaged or weakened your strands may be, we’re spilling our top healthy hair tips so you can spend more time flaunting your strands than frowning at them.
How to Get Healthy Hair
Before we advance to our tips, why is healthy hair important in the first place? Beyond the apparent benefits of hair health — improved confidence, styling versatility, strong strands, and a healthy scalp — healthy hair has an impact on your general well-being.
Think about it: when you look in the mirror and see vibrant, flourishing hair, you feel good, right? Conversely, when hair falls flat, dull, and lifeless, it’s difficult to feel assured in your self-image. Worse, unhealthy hair can signify underlying issues like malnutrition, alopecia, or stress.
Fact is, your hair tells you a lot about the status of your overall health. A sudden influx in shedding could be an allergic reaction to a medication or environmental exposure. Losing color and strands might indicate a nutritional deficiency like Vitamin B or C. And if your scalp is dry and inflamed? Then your follicles will struggle to produce new strands, and this could disrupt the hair growth cycle, the cyclical phases the follicles must encounter to procure hair growth.
Then, of course, there are the reproductive life stages women experience, such as pregnancy, postpartum, and menopause, all of which can cause drastic shifts in hormone levels, leading to changes in hair appearance, texture, and health.
Considering all of the external and internal influences shaping and shifting our hair, working toward getting healthy hair will only produce positive benefits in mood, self-image, health, and well-being.
And that’s why we’re here. So, without further ado, here’s a glance at the tips for healthy hair growth that we’ll expand on in this article.
- Nourish Your Scalp
- Balance Your Diet
- Limit Your Heat Styling
- Wash Your Hair the Right Way
- Protect Your Hair
1. Nourish Your Scalp
To kick off our list of tips for healthy hair growth, let’s talk about the springboard for new hair, the ecosystem of hair health, and the biological framework for regulating the hair growth cycle: the scalp. You may have read that the scalp plays a vital role in hair health, but why exactly?
Here’s a quick anatomy lesson on scalp microbiology to help explain:
The scalp is the skin on your head, and it houses roughly 100,000 follicles. Within each of these numerous follicles is a single hair strand. Although tiny, the follicles explode with biochemical activity because they have a microbiome that reaches deep into the skin and is jam-packed with billions of microorganisms. The follicles feed on nutrients and absorb everything from oxygen to sweat to the sebum (secreted oil) they produce to chemicals in commercial hair products and styling agents.
Because the follicles have a small opening where pre-emergent hairs work to sprout on your scalp, they can absorb either good or bad (or a combination of both) substances.
What’s more, research shows evidence of the interplay between the skin’s immune organ and follicular susceptibility to infection, skin diseases, and the production of various flora and fauna, namely dandruff.
Bottom line? The things you put on your scalp affect its ability to maintain immunity and thus, produce healthy strands. It goes without saying that healthy hair relies on a healthy scalp.
What can you do? Consider introducing a new shampoo with hydrating ingredients like coconut fatty acids and plant-based oils. Whether or not you notice symptoms of an unhealthy scalp — itching, scratching, dandruff, dry scalp, inflammation — regular scalp massages with nourishing oils can help.
To stimulate cell regeneration and foster new hair growth while alleviating common scalp discomforts, massage in healthy hair products like vitamin E oil, coconut oil, or a mixture of plant oils like @theaussierapunzel (#serioushairgoals).
Head here for more remedies for scalp health.
2. Balance Your Diet
Eating a healthy hair diet is a fantastic way to transform the quality of your hair quickly and with relative ease. Studies show that there’s a strong link between diet and hair health. Most important is the association between nutritional deficiencies and hair loss. In fact, lack of micronutrients presents a high risk for developing alopecia, a hair loss condition affecting over 21 million U.S. women.
That’s why it’s absolutely vital to eat the right foods for hair health.
But it’ll take more than simply adding more fruits and veggies to your grocery cart to see a difference. You’ll want to eat specific foods that are rich in nutrients like iron, zinc, Omega 3 fatty acids, protein, and vitamins A and E.
What foods should you introduce to your diet to start getting healthy hair stat? To start, fill your grocery cart with these hair health powerhouses:
- Avocados
- Spinach
- Berries
- Fatty fish
- Eggs
- Seeds and nuts
- Sweet potatoes
- Greek yogurt
Next, let’s explore how heat interacts with your strands.
3. Limit Your Heat-Styling
For many women, healthy hair ebbs and flows through good and bad phases. One season of life may produce shiny, bouncy, youthful hair while another reaps flat, dull-looking strands. It can be frustrating as you scramble to switch products, try new serums and introduce new styling tactics in a never-ending effort to keep hair healthy.
If you relate, you may be wondering how to get healthy hair again. Well, one of the first things you can do to work on getting healthy hair is to take a look at your styling choices. Many of us know that heat tools like flat irons, curling wands, and blow-dryers damage our hair, but we might now know why. Research shows that the hotter the heat, the higher the damage.
Applying heat to hair can alter the structure and morphology of strands by stripping moisture content and damaging the extrinsic hair shaft, leading to dryness, rough texture, and diminished hair color. Because many of these routines are ongoing, the damage compounds.
However, it would be irrational to ask women to break up with their heat styling tools. Instead, we recommend limiting your exposure to heat tools and making some adjustments to your styling habits:
- Dry your hair on a low heat setting and keep the dryer at least 15 cm from your hair.
- Avoid heat tools a couple of days a week, perhaps on a lazy Sunday or day off.
- Apply a hair protectant like INTACT before washing and styling to protect the hair shaft from damage during styling and exposure to heat tools.
Now let’s rewind to before the styling and talk about how to wash your hair correctly.
4. Wash Your Hair the Right Way
When it comes to hair health, your washing habits can either make or break your strands. Wash too little, and sebum (the waxy oils your skin produces) accumulates, causing greasiness. Wash too often, and the follicles dehydrate — bring on the itching and scratching. Is there a sweet spot? Absolutely! But it also depends on your hair type.
Whether you have thick, thin, curly, straight, or anything in-between hair, there are some cardinal rules to follow.
First of all, you’ll want to avoid shampooing your hair every day, which can strip away lubricating oils your strands need to shine and bounce. Secondly, choose a nourishing conditioner containing hydrating ingredients like fatty acids and thick oils like coconut, jojoba, or argan.
Before you step into the shower, apply an anti hair shedding treatment like INTACT thirty minutes before washing. INTACT’s patented technology constricts tiny muscles within the hair follicles to lock in the hair during washing and conditioning, and in turn, you’ll experience less shedding.
Lastly, avoid scorching shower temps, as hot water can strip away oils and dehydrate your scalp, leaving your hair frizzy.
5. Protect Your Hair
The last tip on our list for getting healthy hair is by far the most important, and that’s to take measures to protect your hair before the exposure to damaging influences gains a foothold. We are constantly exposed to external hair threats like heat, environmental toxins, and harsh chemicals in hair products throughout the day. And that’s why your hair needs an effective shield to stay healthy.
Incorporating healthy hair products into your routine will help mitigate the damage and alleviate stress to your follicles and strands. Grab protection in a bottle with INTACT, a patented, clinically-developed hair protectant scientifically crafted to keep your hair on your head. INTACT’s nutrient-packed ingredients form a hydrating elixir your follicles love, including soothing coconut fatty acids and vitamins B3 and B5.
The patented Piliock® Sevilla Orange Complex tightens hair at the root to secure your strands and produce bouncy, youthful, head-turning, healthy hair.
Choose Healthy Hair Today and Always
As we conclude our list of healthy hair tips, remember that minor tweaks have a lasting impact on your hair’s appearance and texture. Instead of doing a rehaul on your daily habits, take small steps to give your hair the best chance at health and beauty.
Are you ready to fix damaged hair, moisturize your scalp, and flaunt your best locks ever? If so, follow the tips we’ve outlined in this guide and grab INTACT, the best hair protectant available. For real results and transformative hair care, INTACT has you covered!
