Wash Your Hair the Right Way! Healthy Hair Routine

How to Wash Your Hair the Right Way

Healthy hair and scalp require two main things, cleanliness and stimulation. Here are some great tips for how to wash your hair in order to help you to keep it healthy and strong.

Brush Before You Wash

As long as you have a hair type that allows it, you should brush through your hair with your fingers or a brush to remove dirt and tangles before you get it wet.

Your hair is most vulnerable when wet, so avoid brushing when it is wet if you can. If you do want to brush it while wet, use a wet brush, or wide tooth comb. If you have a lot of tangles, it is better to use something with wide spaced teeth, not a fine tooth comb.

When brushing your hair, start at the bottom where more tangles tend to be, then continue brushing from the top. This prevents mashing all the tangles together, which can rip and tear your hair when you try to brush through it. Once you have brushed through it, you are ready to wash your hair!

Washing/Shampooing Your Hair

When you wash your hair, focus on cleansing and massaging your scalp with the shampoo. Apply the shampoo onto your scalp, not just on top of your hair. The aim is not to scrub your hair, just your scalp. The shampoo will naturally work its way down the lengths of your hair.

After giving your scalp a good massage you can gently work the shampoo down the hair as necessary, but you don’t need to scrub! Massage to increase blood circulation. This will promotes a healthy scalp and thus hair growth.

Choosing the Right Shampoo

If you are using a professional quality, non detergent based shampoo, you won’t get a lot of lather when you are washing dirty hair. This is good!

The huge amount of lather that you get from using cheap drugstore shampoos happen because they are full of fillers, animal fats, etc. These shampoos work by stripping your hair, while a professional quality shampoo bonds to dirts and oils and pulls them out.

You are not trying to strip your hair completely. Oils are good, they protect your cuticle. So focus on a clean scalp.

Protect Your Ends

If you have really dry or damaged ends, you may want to avoid washing them. You can also apply a protective oil such as coconut, Moroccan, or argon oil on your ends before washing.

How Often Should You Wash?

Your scalp tends to produce enough oils to keep the proper balance. If you are washing your hair every day, you will be producing more oils on a daily basis. This isn’t really necessary.

You can train your scalp, though it may take a couple weeks to come in to a proper balance. Generally washing every 2-3 days is good, or just twice a week. Dry shampoo is great for the days between.

If you are just starting to wash less you may feel overly oily until your scalp adjusts, but it should become better balanced within a couple weeks.

Going Longer Between Washes

Keep in mind how much product and heat you are using on your hair each day. If you are wanting to stretch the time between washes, using less will generally be better.

Extra Tips

If you wrap your wet hair in a towel, don’t twist very hard at the hairline. This can break hairs very easily. Use a smaller lighter towel, and twist lightly farther back on your head if you can.

Don’t scrub your hair to dry it either. Instead, gently pat or scrunch.

Use product before you blow dry. It doesn’t necessarily have to be heat protectant, though this is an easy go to. It just needs to be something light that doesn’t have a hard hold. You can just a light flexible gel or serum. This will help to distribute heat and reduce damage.

Keep the air moving while you dry it. However, don’t blow your hair around like crazy into a fro. Move the air from top to bottom to keep your hair from frizzing. Use sections and take breaks to brush and avoid tangles.

Always use clean tools. You can buy hot tool cleaner, or use a baking soda paste. Make sure you clean the filter on your blow dryer regularly.

Be aware of using an old hair dryer, they tend to lose their ability to distribute heat. The first thing I notice when a hair dryer is going bad is a slight burning smell. This can also occur if you are not cleaning it often.