How to prevent split ends?

Losing hair is every woman’s living nightmare. If you are experiencing hair breakage regularly, you are not alone. More than 40 percent American women fall prey to hair shedding every day. Split ends are a major cause for hair loss in women. They are embarrassing for many and make your hair look ugly. Split ends cause hair breakage so it is important to ensure preventive methods are adopted. It is not easy to remove split ends except cutting them away. Hence, it becomes essential to prevent split ends before they start showing. You need a holistic hair treatment to get rid of your split ends and ensure that they never return back.

Preventing split ends

Unless you spend a major part of your day paying careful attention to your hair, some split ends are inevitable. It is not possible to prevent split ends completely from developing in your hair. However, a few preventive hair treatment routines will help you prevent split ends from ruining the appearance of your beautiful hair.

Shampoos and conditioners

To stop hair breakage, use a moisturizing shampoo and conditioner, focusing the product on your split ends. Rinse your hair with cool water and subsequently use a wide-tooth comb to detangle your hair. Use a shine serum next, gliding it over your split ends. After this routine, dry your hair properly. You do not want frizzy hair making your split ends look worse. Do not ignore split ends if you see them. Treat them immediately.

Regular trimming is must

To prevent hair breakage, you need a regular hair treatment to ensure you keep split ends away. Go for regular trimming (every 6 weeks) as it is important for your hair’s health. Since dry hair split faster, the way you maintain your hair is very important. Brushing wet hair leads to split ends. Do not brush your hair too often as it leads to split ends. Brushing too often can disrupt the epidermis, which can cause the hair strands to split at the tip.

Avoid use of devices

Coloring your hair too often can also lead to split ends. Make sure you look after the health of your hair if you color them too often. Heated appliances will dry your hair and cause them to split. Keep the use of such appliances to a minimal level. If you do expose your hair to such devices, protect them with good quality hair- care products. Avoid drying your hair with a hair dryer.

Diet and accessories

Rubber bands and hair accessories often lead to hair damage.  Do not use them too often on your hair. Most importantly, make sure you take a proper and balanced diet. Your health and diet are important factors that affect your hair. Make sure your diet consists of adequate fats and oils. They are good not just for your hair but for your entire body. A low fat diet must be kept away from as it gives your hair a rough look.

While the average person loses anything between 50-200 hair each day, hair breakage makes you lose a lot more hair. An effective hair treatment routine needs to be adopted by you to prevent split ends from wreaking havoc on the health of your hair. Let hair breakage not affect your confidence. Adopt a hair routine that is effective in preventing split ends.

Treat Your Hair Well - Prevent Hair Breakage

Most women crave for shiny, healthy looking hair, the way it is portrayed in advertisements or movies. But each time you find hair on your pillow, your comb/brush or your towel, it breaks your heart a little. The villain here could be hair breakage or hair shedding.

Many experts; be it advertisements on TV, magazines, internet, or even your friends and family, who advise you on how to treat your hair. Some of them are authentic, others are just assumptions. It is always better to find out the cause of hair breakage before going into what to do about it. Firstly, hair breakage is not a natural process because it is caused due to the weakening of hair, breaking it off from the middle. This weakening is the result of one or many things that are done wrong to treat your hair.

The main reason for hair breakage is running a comb through just-washed hair in a hurry. Hair is extremely sensitive and fragile when it is wet and combing or brushing will cause it to entangle and breakage occurs. The best way to handle this is to detangle your hair with your fingers and comb through it when it is dry. Show some patience while doing this, because tugging and pulling at your hair to get a quick job done causes further breakage.

Save those curling tongs or straighteners for special occasions; your hair does not need to go through extreme heat treatments daily. It would be best if you could avoid blow drying your hair every day and let it air dry. But if that is not possible, allow your hair to partially air dry and then use the dryer at a low level of heat after applying a heat protecting mousse or spray. Using high quality styling tools and hair brushes/combs can help you prevent hair breakage. Avoid rubbing your hair vigorously with the bath towel which causes friction and thus damaging the cuticles. See a doctor for itchy scalp, because vigorous scratching causes hair to break off.

Go easy on your hair products like hair sprays, hair gels and hair colors. A long lasting hold of your hair gel will make the hair stiff and brittle causing breakage. Colouring your hair frequently also causes heavy hair breakage because of the chemicals in the hair colors. Use ammonia free, semi-permanent colors for less damage. Get your coloring done by a professional, because the before and after care of hair coloring should be given a lot of importance. Apart from the three regular hair types – oily, dry and normal – people have a combination of oily scalp and dry hair. Ask your hair stylist for the best shampoo, conditioner and other hair products that you should use to stop hair breakage and how to apply them effectively.

Excessive sun exposure causes weakening of hair which allows it to break easily. Try to cover your hair when out in severely sun, and use sun-protect serum to reduce the damage. Use moisturizing shampoos and conditioners during winters as your hair tends to dry out soon.

The best way to handle hair breakage is by taking measures to never let it happen in the first place. Because as they say, prevention is definitely better than cure.

Hair products for damaged hair

Hair breakage is a problem of the masses. In a world filled with pollutants, a busy, fast-paced life and fast food, the hair takes a fair bit of beating. The constant change of colour, straightening, using the blow-drying and every little experiment that you ever tried on your hair can cause hair breakage. Hair breakage products are those, which work on damaged hair and repair them. They cure the mechanics of damaged hair and help to stop hair breakage. A hair breakage product must have certain qualities and needs to bring about a set of desired results.

Products in the market

Markets are swamped with hair shedding prevention or hair breakage products. Each hair breakage product is trying to outwit the other by adding or removing an ingredient. Colourful packaging, snazzy taglines and celebrity endorsements may get the customer to use it, but it is the final product, that would make the one- time customer a loyal patron. Causes of hair breakage may vary but the treatment to prevent hair breakage is very simple. Keep good care of your hair.

Selecting the right product

Let’s consider the hair breakage products in the market. There are moisturizers, shampoos, conditioners, oils, lotions and even food products to help prevent hair breakage. The brands too, range from local one to international giants. One must consider a few points before selecting a hair breakage product.

Check if its natural, which would mean it does not contain chemicals or non-bio material. This is important because anything unnatural would only increase hair breakage. Make sure that the company is not under any environmental debate or controversy. What is not good for the environment is certainly not going to be good for you. Certain ingredients found in soaps and shampoos are sodium laureth sulphate (SLES) and sodium lauryl sulphate (SLS). Neither is good for the hair, so watch out for these in your hair breakage product.

Some of the brands that endorse sulphate free and quality products include L’oreal, TRESemm’e, John Freid, etc. All these products are a way to halt hair breakage and to make your hair look lush, shiny and healthy. Hair breakage products are not just soaps and creams. A blow dryer that emits charged particles instead of hair damaging heat like the Ionic Blow Dryer can also be a hair breakage product. The trick is what to use and when?

Select according to your hair type

Begin by understanding your hair, its texture and it needs. Then go to a good hair expert, like your mother who has beautiful thick hair or a cousin in shiny bouncy strands and ask them what they do to keep such good-looking hair. Many use homemade products like ginseng, Indian gooseberry and neem as a hair breakage product. Now these are easily available and their use is quite simple. Other products such as international creams, conditioners and shampoo, may not be so easy to find. So make it a point to use local remedies and if the hair fall persists, then go to a hair-expert and take the necessary steps. Each hair type has a specific remedy. It is not a one-bullet-kills-all kind of remedy. A hair breakage product that is not natural, but specific to your problem should be selected. In extreme cases, you may have to use certain chemicals but make sure that you do not use it beyond the recommended period.