So You Want Long Hair.

This is a little essay about the best ways to grow long, healthy hair. It's mostly concentrated on breakage and how to prevent it with proper handling of the hair. I won't be recommending products at all.

Also, when I say "long hair," I really mean it. I'm talking waist-length at least, not what the fashionistas think is long, meaning anything below the chin. I'm a-talkin' LAWNG.

My hair is dark, wavy, thick/coarse, and dry, so a lot of what I will say will probably go for that hair type, but since my hair does tend to be on the fragile side, I imagine that most of these handling tips will be helpful by erring on the side of extreme caution. People with a tighter cuticle who get fewer split ends can probably break these rules with fewer problems.

If you're curious, my hair looks like this. The color is fairly accurate. The daily bunning smooths it out tremendously, but if I go to bed with it damp and loose, it generally turns into medium-sized spirals about the width of an old-style telephone cord. (Sometimes I think I'm the only person who buns or braids her hair damp to make it calm down rather than become wavier!)

Here you can see its progress over the past three or so years. The picture on the left was my hair for most of the 90s -- dry, crackly, and breaking off constantly because I wore it down every day and didn't know how to handle it carefully. The image on the right is my hair today -- classic length and in much better condition.

If you are a fetish hair lover, and you feel a burning need to contact me, attempt to maneuver me into a conversation, and thereby demonstrate to me and yourself that you aren't really a sicko like all those other fetish hair lovers out there, I strongly recommend that you peruse my firearms page, and then ask yourself whether or not that would be a wise idea.

But Doesn't Long Hair Take Much More Time And Care?

And here we arrive at the core myth: No. In fact, it takes far less.

Most people rarely let their hair grow much past their shoulders, which in the world of long hair is still considered quite short. And at that length, most people still must engage in a lot of care and styling. Trims every six weeks, rollers or flatirons, mousses and gels ... And naturally, most people assume that if only a little bit of hair requires up to 10 or 15 minutes of preparation each morning, long hair must require much more! They then mention this to their stylist -- who depends on them coming in every six weeks for trims and products, to the tune of some $100 each time -- and the stylist of course solemnly agrees with them. Perhaps they say something about how, "Oh some women can let their hair do that, but you can't. You need the trims and products, and by the way we just got a new shipment of (whatever product the salon is contracted to sell) this week ... " Never forget, that $100 every six weeks depends on this belief!

So the myth persists: five minutes of hot rollers or flatironing in the morning for shoulder length hair must correspond to forty-five minutes each morning for very long hair. In fact, the exact opposite is the case: long hair requires no such styling. In fact, it often requires that one avoid such styling. My own hair, at mid-thigh length, takes roughly fifteen seconds of styling each morning.

Most typically, I comb it -- I do not brush -- to remove any tangles (of which there are very few since I rarely wear it down). Then, I twist it gently to put it into a bun at the back of my head, I choose one of my menagerie of hairsticks for the day, and I slip it in. Voilà -- fifteen seconds. Perhaps it will take a minute if I wear it in a Ficcare braid instead (see the Styling page). I may use a bit of silicone serum scented from a collection of essential oils if I'm in the mood, possibly a fingernail's worth of coconut oil, or I may not.

And that's it. No hot rollers, no flatirons, no curling irons. No blowdrying, no daily washing, no fussing, no primping, no trims, no bother at all in fact. I never even have bad hair days; when your hair is as long as mine, gravity works its will over and above any mere bad hair day. I need never worry at all about having slept on it wrong.

Not only that, but it is kept neat and out of my way every minute of every day. I joked to a friend of mine with a crewcut once that we were the only two people I knew who could ride in a convertible with the top down on the freeway without any concern for our hair. Hers is a brushcut, far too short to move much less tangle. Mine? Every single hair is back, neat, and out of the way. Perfect!

And that's the secret. Long hair requires almost no fuss and bother. In fact, if you want it long, you'll do away with fuss and bother, which will be addressed in more depth in the "Antique Lace" section.

Advice No Other Article Will Give You

What this article will not do is tell you how to look like her in six weeks for your wedding or dance. Growing long, healthy hair is a process of benign neglect. If you don't have a spare $2,000 lying around for extensions, you must essentially ignore the dictates of fashion for roughly a decade. The articles written today extolling the virtues of long hair will be replaced tomorrow by ones telling you that the next must-have-do is a pixie. (And they will be written by the same people!) If you cut at a whim, you will not have long hair, and fashion is after all, all about whims. When you achieve the Perfect Look, they change the target; that's what they do, because they want your money and attention.

This article also will not recommend specific products. Often, the reactions of various people's hair to products is so individual and varied that trial and error is almost the only way to find out what works for you. You hear "Silicones killed my hair!" as often as you hear "Silicones are a godsend!" "Oiling is wonderful!" "Oiling never works for me." "Glycerin is the secret to healthy hair." "Throw out all your glycerin-based products." Hair reaction to these products often depends on exactly what type and texture of hair you have; the jojoba oil that works so well for some women, for example, makes my hair crunchy and horrible. And what works for me may work on other women with hair of my type, but there's no guarantee. What I'm going to talk about here is how to handle and treat your hair.

This article will give you advice that no other fashion advice article will tell you -- you have to not care about fashion for the next ten years. You have to realize that, if you don't have the money to blow on extensions, you'd best just resign yourself to settling in for a long, long wait. Despite the urban legends and snake-oil advertisements in fashion magazines, there is really very little you can do to help grow your hair faster. Hair growth rates differ from person to person, but for the vast, vast majority of people in good health, it sits tight at about a half-inch per month. Instant gratification is possible with microwave popcorn, but not long hair.

Even extensions won't work in the long run. Many people don't understand the process by which small bundles of hair are literally glued, clipped, or sewn to the roots of your existing hair to create false length. The glue, clips, and thread are there to secure the false hair, not to condition your natural hair, and it creates a good amount of strain on your roots by hanging weight off of them and stiffening then with the glue or pinching them with the clips or thread as opposed to letting them flex naturally. This is a recipe for tremendous breakage.

Eventually those extensions will need to be cut out at some point, and it's a lead-pipe cinch that the hair that's left will be damaged -- often matted, occasionally dreaded, and not nice neat dreads, either. All those glamorous celebrities with their professional extensions get pixie cuts four months later for a reason -- to cover up the damage and resulting bald spots. Even with all their money, and with dozens of people devoted to making them look their best, top celebrities like Jennifer Aniston, Keira Knightley, Kate Beckinsale, and Christina Aguilera can't avoid the destruction of their hair from these things. All of these women have gone from long-and-thick to pixie because of damage caused by extensions, including bald spots, breakage, and the distintegration of their natural hair ... that's what extensions do for you.

Extensions can give you long hair for a short while (as long as you don't walk through a breeze or next to a fan, where your roots lift and show off all those lovely little glue balls), but it's one step forward, two steps back. Remember what your natural nails looked like the last time you had acrylic nails removed? Now, imagine your hair in similar shape. The stylist will tell you differently, but the stylist is also trying to get you to part with over four figures worth of money.

If you truly want immediate gratification, investigate falls -- false hair that you can clip or tie onto your own shorter hair or around a bun. You can even find brightly colored ones made of wool, plastic lacing, or even strips of foam for a bit of fun. Either way, a nice fall can be a good, relatively inexpensive, and non-permanent way to gain a bit of length for a special occasion without the significant damage of so-called "permanent" extensions. You can even make your own.

Essentially, if you are the kind of person who pages through fashion magazines to get just the right look, you probably will not achieve very long hair. If you really do want long hair, here's the secret:

Just put your hair up and ignore every other fashion advice article you read for a decade. Best to simply stop reading them. Long hair is achieved by forgetting about your hair. It's achieved by not worrying about the dictates of the fashion mags. Long hair is what happens when you aren't paying attention to your hair. Then one day, you wake up and get ready for work and realize that you just tucked it into your pants. :-)

How Is Your Hair Like Antique Lace?

Basically, if you want your hair to grow, don't do anything to it that you wouldn't do to your grandmother's antique lace tablecloth. In summary:

1. Wear it up.
2. Do not abrade it.
3. Shampoo the roots, condition the ends.
4. KILL YOUR BLOW-DRYER.
5. Avoid elastics.
6. NO BLEACH.

Now, let's go through one by one:

1) Wear it up.
Every day, or at least as often as possible. I know, a lot of times when your hair's long you want to wear it down to show it off. If your hair is shiny and has a tight cuticle, you may be able to get away with wearing it down more often, but if it's like mine, you can't. You just can't. The ends will dry up and snap right the hell off. Bun that sucker. As often as possible. Think of it as having a secret from the rest of the world. Besides, it gives you lots of excuses to buy tons of great hairsicks.

This would seem to contradict #4 in my list of pointers: Avoid elastics. However, there are lots of ways to put your hair up completely securely in an office-appropriate way without elastics. On my Styles page, you'll find lots of options for very long hair. Unless your hair is extremely thick, most of these styles should work for hair of mid-back length as well. (The thicker your hair is, the longer it needs to be to cooperate for these styles.) At any rate, keep it up.

Like that lace tablecloth, don't bring it out all the time. Don't let it flop around and stress the threads. Don't let it hang in a breeze. Keep it gently bundled, not too tightly, and take it out only for special occasions.

2) Do not abrade it.
Friction is the lapdog of Satan. It strips the outer layer (the cuticle, the overlapping downward-pointed scales that surround the core of your hair) off of the core of the hair, weakening it and causing it to break and split. This is the single most damaging thing for hair and can cause it to stop dead in its growing tracks and stall for years. Believe me, I know.

Your hair is always growing; the dreaded "terminal length" is a lot further away than you think. If it seems like it's not growing, then it's far more likely that it's actually breaking off at the same rate at which it's growing. You grow roughly a half-inch per month. If the ends of your hair are abraded and weakened to the point of breakage, you are losing that half-inch every month as well. So, if you want your hair to grow, you need to be concerned primarily with the ends, more so than the roots. If you and your scalp are in good health and you eat well, your roots should be just fine. It's far more the condition of the older, more fragile ends that determines your terminal length. And any abrasion at all is your enemy.

Use a wide-toothed comb with nice, smooth, widely-spaced tines. You can usually find these at beauty supply stores. Comb it gently. Start at the ends and work your way up so as to work out tangles. Don't do it too often, and if you leave it bunned during the day, chances are you won't have to. This is also related to not leaving it down, because even a long braid will be abraded between your back and your office chair, the seat in your car, the back of your couch, etc. Every time you shift your position in your seat, you are rubbing the hair against two very unforgiving surfaces as well as against itself. Ignore the old adage about 100 strokes a night. And unless you want irrevocable stains on your immortal soul, do not tease or back-comb. Teasing and back-combing demolishes hair.

Imagine taking that lace tablecloth and wrapping it around yourself like a cloak, rubbing it between your back and everything you sit on. Every day. How long do you think it'd take before it went totally threadbare and started to disintegrate? And if you brushed it with a lint brush 100 times a night, every night? Sweaters and jackets pill on the back, where they are rubbed against by car seats and furniture. The same friction that pills your wool sweater across your back can strip the cuticle off your hair as well.

3) Shampoo the roots, condition the ends.
Sparingly. The roots don't need conditioning, and the ends don't need detergents. And wean yourself off the mousses, gels, spritzes, sprays, and gawd knows what else. It's just drying gunk that makes you have to wash your hair more frequently anyhow. I won't tell you what to use, as this is an article about handling, but whatever you use, shampoo/condition as little as possible.

After all, you don't run that lace tablecloth through the washing machine, and you don't drench it in spray starch or fabric softener. If you must clean it, you generally swish it gently in the sink and then, as gawd is your witness, you do not throw it in the dryer. Which brings us to the next point:

4) KILL YOUR BLOW-DRYER.
When you bun it every day, it's not like you need to care if it's wet anyway, because you just bun it as normal. Kill the thing. And send your curling iron after it. NO HEAT APPLIANCES. AT ALL. That includes the flatiron, too. And I promise you, if you treat it better, your curls will be shinier and happier anyway.

(A few words about flatirons as well -- I grew up in the 80s, when curling irons were what everyone used. Flatirons are a lot hotter than those things ever got, especially the ceramic ones. They are at temperatures than can boil sparse water. What do you think that is doing to the water in your hair? There is no such thing as damage-free flatironing. At all. I don't care what the sales clerk told you, and I don't care what special concoction you bought for $40/oz to slather on your hair to "protect" it.)

That lace tablecloth will be threadbare and falling apart after a few trips through the dryer, on high or low, and ironing it? Yikes.

5) Avoid elastics.
Even the supposedly "gentle" ones that you see in the supermarket. Even if they are the cloth-covered ones, if you braid your hair and put an elastic in it frequently, you're effectively pinching the hair at the same point every day, and where it's oldest and weakest besides. You can break metal by doing that with it -- pinching and bending a paper clip in the same place just a few times can make it snap in half. It'll weaken and stress the ends of your hair as well.

Textile conservators will tell you not to fold that antique lace tablecloth in the same spot every time, because the fold line will get weak. Putting an elastic in the vulnerable ends of your hair in the same spot over and over will do the same thing.

6) NO BLEACH.
Yikes, don't bleach your hair. There is nothing worse than bleach and double-process (bleach+color) for damaging perfectly healthy hair. Love what you've got, and it'll love you back, and grow-grow-grow.

You wouldn't dream of dumping bleach on that lace tablecloth, so don't put it on your hair.

This goes for perming and straightening, too. OMG, keep those harsh nasties away from your precious hair.

In summary again -- if you wouldn't do it to your grandmother's antique lace tablecloth, don't do it to your hair.

Lies You'll Hear on Your Way to Long Hair

The biggest problem that that the hair and salon industry has with very long hair is that it's cheap. It takes almost no outlay of money whatsoever. Short hair requires trims every month and a half to two months to keep a short, styled cut from getting shaggy and unkempt. Such styled cuts often require gels, sprays, spritzes, mousses, curling or straightening, and other nonsense to give them the shape they need to look their best. As I said above, all of this can add up to $100 every six weeks or so, often more, not to mention the time spent in front of the bathroom mirror every morning.

Compared to that, very long hair signifies to the salon and product industry that someone's not coughing up. As a result, some of the "tips" you'll find online for growing long, lush hair are aimed more at making sure that you still keep forking over money than that you actually succeed in your quest for length.

By far, the two most common tips you'll get are the ones that tell you to keep getting frequent trims every six weeks and buy the most expensive products you can afford. Hogwash to both! Frequent trims give you nothing but shorter hair, and any busy stylist sees hundreds of people. They are not going to be capable of remembering with machinelike precision exactly what constitutes "longer than the last time you saw me a month and a half ago but shorter than now." Invariably, they will trim off all of that month and a half's worth of growth, and you'll be right back to where you are now, wondering why your hair never seems to grow even though you're doing everything the "experts" tell you to do. Many stylists don't really understand how to help hair grow long -- understandably, since their job is to cut it for money. I well remember the times I would express disappointment over why my hair just wouldn't grow, only to be told with great sympathy, "Well, some women just can't, sweetie," by the very same person snipping away to the tune of some $50 per visit. If you've been stopping into the salon every two months and telling your stylist that you want it to grow to your waist, and yet you haven't seen a hint of real growth in almost a year, this is probably why. Try simply not going for six months and see what happens. You'll probably start to see some real growth.

Now, there is a tiny, tiny kernel of truth in their singleminded drive to get you to keep going into the salon and dropping upwards of $50 a pop every six weeks: you do have to get rid of split ends from time to time or else they'll break off and take all of your nice, lovely new growth with them. You can, however, deal with this yourself. Called "dusting," the technique involves getting a good pair of professional hair scissors and trimming off your split ends yourself. You can't get them all, and it will be a sort of "trim them as you see them" thing, but you can get a great deal done by simply keeping a good barber's scissor by your nightstand and trimming them here and there when you see them. Otherwise, pulling your hair back in a scrunchy ponytail, carefully sliding the thing down to your backside, and snipping off the end of the resulting tiny ponytail is a perfectly good way to get a decent trim, especially if you have wavy hair. If your hair is straight or you want a more exacting way to trim it yourself, try Feye's Method, a tried-and-true technique much loved in the long hair world.

And again, the single most important thing you can do to deal with split ends is to handle your hair carefully and wear it up as often as possible. The best way to cope with split ends is to avoid them in the first place, because once they show up, all there is to do is chop `em off. (Nope, nothing "seals" or "repairs" them. Nothing. At all. Nope, no matter what the commercial said.)

And as far as buying expensive products goes, as I stated above, products are just stuff that make you have to wash your hair more frequently anyhow, and most shampoo formulations are pretty much identical. Conditioners can be divvied up into those with silicone derivatives and those without. Use the former if you are able to wash relatively infrequently (once a week or less frequently), and give the others a shot if you feel like it. Whatever you settle on, wash as little as you can get away with.

Of course, on top of these general guidelines is the one overarching rule for anything, applicable to just about all walks of life: Believe no one who is trying to sell you something. "Oh yes, split ends are normally not repairable, but with our new, special, and different patented formula, invented in our laboratories (Ooooooh!) by really smart Science Guys in white coats and available for only $29.95 plus tax ... !"

*bzzt*

"Normally, flat-ironing is damaging, but our revolutionary flatiron uses space-age polymers--"

*bzzt*

"Most ordinary perming solutions will damage your hair, but you see, this isn't a perming solution. It's a wave-enhancing solution specially formulated to--"

*bzzt*

Three strikes, you're out. Thank you for playing.

The best guideline for this is to just use your head. If you can't fathom how something works even when you give it some thought, it probably doesn't. Seriously -- what does Infusium 23 do, anyhow? Infest your head with microscopic elves who run down every strand of hair individually and glue the split ends back together by hand, or what?

Believe no one who is trying to sell you something. They lie. Like cheap toupees. I'm serious. You'll notice that none of the guidelines I've given involve an outlay of money, with the exception of buying a good pair of barber scissors to keep yourself. In fact, insofar as you won't have to buy another hair dryer, curling or flat-iron and will be washing your hair less frequently, you'll spend far less on your hair, in time and money both.

And then there's always my favorite lie, the Calibration Lie From Which All Other Hair Lies Are Descended: "Older women shouldn't have long hair." I'm 42, and I'm not getting any younger. The sparse greys I have are gradually increasing in number, and I haven't the slightest intention of cutting it. Following fashion and looking (or acting) like everyone else thinks I should has never been high on my list of things to do in the past, and the older I get, the less I care about following useless "shoulds" I had no say in because People Will Talk. For me, that's the best part of hitting middle age: not giving a damn about the things I consider not worth giving a damn about. And the opinions of sniping total strangers who want me to conform has always been rock-bottom on the list of things that matter to me.

Besides, do you know what really ages you? Looking like a woman who just hit her 40th birthday and chopped her hair off in an attempt to look young and trendy. If you like it short that's one thing, but nothing advertises "I just turned 40" like a sudden chop done under peer pressure. So if you're sitting there reading this and asking yourself, "Am I too old for long hair?" I'm here to tell you: You're too old to let other people control what you do. Caving in to peer pressure and doing what's expected is for teenagers and insecure young people. It's your hair. If you're 68 and you want it long, then grow it, and anyone who doesn't like it can go pound sand. Even when it comes to something as unimportant in the grand scheme of things as hair, try not to wind up lying on your back and staring up at a hospital ceiling telling yourself, "I always wanted to do X and never did it, but at least it made everyone else happy."

What Not To Do: Learning from Mistakes

Just a few general guidelines here in addition to the above admonition to believe no one who wants your money:

1. Do not take advice from people with hair significantly different from yours. I can't tell you how much solemn, earnest advice I took from salesgirls with chin-length, fine, perfectly straight hair that ended up disastrously. If you're looking for advice, find someone with hair similar in color and texture to your own who wears it in a way you find attractive. I can't emphasize this enough: give priority to advice from someone with hair very like your own. My styles page is a good example; although the styles will work for most lengths and textures of hair, women with extremely sleek hair will find them more of a challenge. If your hair is also extremely sleek, find a woman with hair like yours and ask her advice. And be honest with yourself (point #6): give priority to advice from the woman with hair like yours, not the woman with the hair you wish you had. Haircare tips from cultures where people have your hair type are also a great starting point; Greeks and Italians have been using extra-virgin olive oil on our hair since the time of the Iliad for a reason. Africans have been using shea butter for even longer.
2. Avoid stylists with hair very like yours that has been radically altered. My worst experiences have hands-down been trims that I've gotten from women with thick, dark ethnic hair that was flatironed and bleached. If their hair is similar to yours and they dislike it enough to alter it significantly, they will not be the best judge of how to handle what you have, nor how to bring out its natural character to best effect. (If on the other hand, you want yours flatironed and bleached, they're the best sources of advice.)
3. Don't spend too much money on any one care product. Having blown $75 on a small bottle of conditioner makes you less able to judge honestly how well it works. No one wants to admit, even to themselves, that the astronomically expensive European, high-tech hair goop they bought at the department store for $125 was so much snake oil. Avoid parting with too much money.
4. Don't overcomplicate things. It's hair, not theoretical fifth-force cosmology. Stylists and cosmetics companies like to give you the feeling that it's a massive challenge, but the truth is that hair care is just not that complicated. The companies that have been studying this for a century and their armies of chemists have solved the problem a long time ago, but if we all knew that, we could just buy what worked and get on with life. They don't want us to do that, and honestly, neither do we; most people like trying out new things with new packaging and new scents from time to time and consider it fun. There are about five ingredients that are used in endless combination to clean and condition hair that really work: sodium lauryl sulfate and sodium laureth sulfate for shampoo, dimethicone and cyclomethicone for conditioner, and coconut oil or olive oil for added leave-ins. All the other stuff -- and I do mean all -- is window-dressing. Change the texture and scent, and you have tomorrow's "breakthrough" in hair care. Seriously -- this is a solved problem. Don't make it harder than it needs to be.
5. Avoid blanket condemnations of natural or synthetic hair products. There are natural products that are wonderful, like henna, tested and used for many thousands of years. There are equally natural products, tested and used for thousands of years, that are murderously dangerous such as tobacco. There are synthetic products that should be avoided at all costs -- PPD hair dyes, as an example, which can cause terrible allergies and chemical sensitivities. There are synthetic products that are inert, useful, and work just fine when properly used -- silicone hair conditioners being a perfect example. There are very, very few entire classes of products that are either completely good or completely evil.
6. Be honest with yourself. If you spent a ton of money on something and it's just not working out, just chalk it up as a learning experience and move on. If you fell for the hype -- pro or con -- of the latest new Thing, and it doesn't seem to work for you, shrug and do what does work. Don't throw good money, or good effort, after bad. Also, be honest with yourself about your hair. Hair is overwhelmingly determined by DNA; if your hair tends to be fine, there is very little you can do to make it come out of your head coarse. If your hair is curly, there is no shampoo on Earth that will make your head begin growing it straight. If you have ash brown hair, the Goth-black you covet will probably be overpowering on you. Haircare may, for the most part, be a solved problem, but while it can make the hair you have look its best, it cannot give you the hair you wish you had if your scalp is just not interested in generating that sort of hair. This leads into the next topic:
7. If you work against the natural color or texture of your hair, your hair will be high-maintenance. This is a strange thing to say, but it needs to be said. If you have dark hair and you bleach it, you will see pepper-spots at the roots after one week. If you color grey, you must think ahead and give yourself an exit strategy or else you will be swearing rather a lot in a few years time. If you have curly hair and straighten, you will fear humidity and rain like some people fear death, and your hair will simply not grow long. If you have straight hair and get a perm, your hair will be dry and fragile and still require curling, and will also likely not grow long. Now, these things are all possible, and if you like to play with your hair, they can even be fun -- but they will rarely to never be "wash and go" styles. They will involve time, effort, and money. Be aware of that before you get started. If you are on a tight budget for any one of these, you may want to think twice.
8. Be patient. Hair does not grow overnight. Joining a dozen online communities and reading seventeen websites about long hair will not cause your hair to grow any faster. As I stated above, ignore it and it will grow. Find something else to obsess about. I would even advise you to check your growth only every six months and use a camera, not a tape measure.
9. HANDLING MATTERS MORE THAN PRODUCT. Again, this piece of advice is at the heart of these pages. It's not what you use, but how you use it and how you handle your hair that counts.