My Hair Routine: Keep it Simple, Sister

Every now and then, I'll see a post on one of the various long hair care boards on LiveJournal where the poster asks what she can do to help her hair grow, or proposes a new hair care regime to do so.

Almost invariably, the post will include a proposed new regime consisting of thirteen hot oil and deep conditioning treatments, six leave-ins, various pomades and butters, and about thirty-seven herbal concoctions that each take six parts and must be made at the crossroads under a full Moon.

Well, okay. Maybe not that last. But nevertheless, the list of things that the poster wants to do or feels the need to do to get her hair to grow can often exhaust me just reading it. (It's an even money bet as to whether the same poster admits that she bleaches and flatirons her hair, but insists that that can't possibly be the reason why it's not growing.) Often, I feel like taking her by the shoulders and telling her, "Put down the shopping basket and back away slowly." Given the barrage of products being hurled at it (and the implied impatience on the part of the poster), it's no wonder her poor hair has given up the ghost. I imagine it groaning under the weight of all these treatments, knowing that as soon as Hot Oil Treatment #4,112 fails to result in hair just like Angelina Jolie's, Deep Conditioning Treatment #377 and Hair Mask #1,019 are going to be thrown at it five minutes later, resulting in the same disappointment.

So here's the first bit of advice I have for you: Take it easy.

Give your poor hair a rest from the bombardment. Want it long? Handle it gently, put it up every day, and ignore it.

By way of illustration, I'll list my own hair routine here. I don't promise a thing if you follow this course. My hair may be very different from yours, and anyway I'm not trying to give you a list of exact directives to follow but am only including my own routine in order to show you just how uncomplicated long hair care can be. But you shouldn't read this and try it, and then conclude that it "doesn't work" even after you've spent five months braiding your hair the exact same way she did!!!!! and it's not down to your thighs yet!!!!!!!!! :-)

The Basic Routine -- Quick and Easy

• I wash my hair every week. Yep. You heard that. It's not greasy, it's not oily, it doesn't smell. And I'm certainly not saying that I wash the rest of me as infrequently! But my hair gets thoroughly soaked through and shampooed/conditioned once every week. If your hair is finer or sleeker than mine, you may not be able to go that long -- but it's a lead-pipe cinch that you should wash it as infrequently as you can manage. Wet hair is weak hair.
  
  Also, I do not pile my hair on top of my head, but leave it hanging down my back while washing it. I shampoo with whatever Pantene I got last time, working it through the roots only and squishing the suds through the length, but not scrubbing it at all. I then rinse it out thoroughly, and squirt a glop of conditioner into my hand the size of a lime, and work that through the length. (Shampoo the roots, condition the ends.) I leave that in my hair while I wash the rest of me (and my hair is still hanging down my back during this), and when I finish washing me, I rinse the conditioner out of my hair thoroughly. And yes, I do take special care to make sure that I don't end up with a sticky film of conditioner down my back.


• I do not blow dry it, but instead comb it out gently with a wide-tined detangling rake, and braid it in one long nape braid. I then either put it up with a Ficcare clip or a pinless braided bun (both of which styles can be found on the Styles page). I then forget about it. It's up, just as it is when dry. QED.


• I let the braid down at night, but do not unbraid it. It's left in a long nape braid while I sleep. I wake up the next day, unbraid and rebraid the still-damp hair without combing it out (it doesn't generally need it, and I just redo it to tighten up the braid and make it neat from having been slept on for a night), and then it goes back up in either the Ficcare braid or pinless bun.


• After it is dry (and it may be damp for days), I comb it thoroughly and then can style it however I want -- Gibraltar bun, Figure-8, pinless bun, high braided bun, whatever appeals from the Styles page. Under no circumstances do I brush it. I comb it in the morning, style it, take the style out at night upon which point I comb it again to remove the day's shed hairs, and then braid it for sleep.
  
  I should also specify that I do not put an elastic in my hair for sleep, and that its texture is such that about two-thirds of the length will stay braided until I get up. If your hair is sleeker than mine, you may not be able to do this and may have to use a very gentle scrunchy or ouchless elastic to keep the braid in place overnight.


• I may (or may not) use a nickel-sized blob of silicone serum once a week or so worked through the length and scented from a collection of essential oils that I have, before putting my hair up as normal.


• From then, it's another week to wash day! And if I push it to the next weekend, I don't really stress about it.

That's it. No herbal infusions, no hot oils. No deep treatments, no moisture packs or hair masks or beaten eggs or mayonnaise. Almost nothing. Wash every week, style wet as dry, comb twice a day, braid for sleep. Very little product. (Like I said, it's handling that counts, not products.)

I admit that this may be a bit low-maintenance for some people. There are people who like doing all the fussy stuff and consider it pampering. There are also people (often very young but not always) who are just impatient, and even if they say that they aren't expecting Gisele's hair to sprout out of their head, they nevertheless get very disappointed if they don't have supermodel bombshell hair in a week's time. And other people just like complexity and find buying and collecting tons of different kinds of products to be fun.

There's the opposite extreme as well -- people who go water-only or get a crew cut so that they can use soap and water and wash their hair just like they wash any other part of themselves. De gustibus and all that.

I'm somewhere in the middle -- liking the extreme simplicity of long hair, but not wanting to go quite so low-tech as not shampoo it at all. After all, hair, like nails, is not generally meant to grow to extreme lengths in nature -- that's why evolution decided to make it grow continuously, because there's an unstated assumption that it will break off with daily wear and tear. To get it to mid-thigh, it generally takes a bit of artificial post-Industrial-Revolution care. As a consequence, totally water-only isn't my thing, and all-natural shampoos and conditioners aren't, either. While I've foundcoconut oil to be very good,most of the other hair oils like olive and jojoba don't do boo for nme or else actually make my hair harder to handle. For the most part, it's the all-chemical-all-the-time Pantene that does me fine -- in sparing quantities.

General Hair Safety

I feel the need to bring this up; there's also another good reason to wear your hair up when aiming for super-lengths, especially when you start to achieve them: safety.

Long hair is a nice, convenient handle on the back of your head which is hard to keep track of and control when it's down. You've probably neglected to realize that your hair was caught on a button or doorknob a few times in your life. You may have even stepped or knelt on your own hair when bending over. Ever failed to realize that your finger was caught in a car door or being knelt on? Probably not. For that reason alone, if your hair is unusually long, you must keep it up and out of the way in many situations. In fact, I'd say most.

And a ponytail or braid doesn't count as "up." It could in fact be worse, as the hair is then concentrated in an incredibly strong and easily grabbable rope that will not give out before your skin does. Stories abound of people having been scalped by heavy machinery after their hair has been caught in it, and a ponytail or braid only allows the machine to catch every single hair on your head and tug forcefully and suddenly on all of them. While it may not seem to make sense, it's true: skin will tear away before hair will under those circumstances.

In many situations (and in my opinion, driving is one of them), your hair must not only be tied back away from your face but confined as well. A bun or a completely clipped-up braid is hands-down the safest way to wear hair of any extreme length. Keep a hairstick with you at all times. If you don't have one with you and still want to ride that rollercoaster, braid it in one long nape braid and then tuck it completely into your clothing. Like I said, it's a rope and an easily grabbable one -- and moreover, it's hooked up to your head!

It's also important to realize that children are not mature enough to take these safety considerations into account as often as they should. (Indeed, adults sometimes fail to do so.) If you have a little daughter with knee-length hair, please consider cutting it. A small child simply doesn't have the maturity to be aware of these sorts of considerations.

A Short Word About `Cones

I've heard a great deal about the evils of cone-laden shampoos and conditioners, meaning shampoos and conditioners that contain silicone or silicone-like materials like dimethicone, or other long chemical names that end in -cone. Many people insist that they are the most damaging thing you could put on your hair, while other use them without concern. I have to say that I fall into the latter group. I see nothing wrong with cones as long as they are used sparingly.

Often, the reason given for disliking cones is that they damage the hair by causing gunky buildup to accumulate under the scales of the cuticle, and then mask the damage by making the hair sleeker and less tangly. In this case, the best response is to use them sparingly, so that you can take advantage of the shininess and tangle-free properties that the stuff will give your hair while avoiding too much buildup. If you wash your hair several times a week, you may have to avoid them, but if you wash less frequently, cones shouldn't present you with any difficulty. As with anything, moderation is key.

I also admit to some skepticism about the complaint that they cause and then mask damage. It sounds too much to me like a slightly more "scientific" version of the ridiculous but persistent urban myth that Carmex puts ground glass into their lip balm so that your lips get drier and you use more of it, which is clearly bunk. Can you imagine being told that rubbing your forehead with sandpaper will make your skin smoother, doing so, and then saying to yourself, "It didn't work! I'd better do more of it!" And as far as masking damage goes ... well, life damages hair. Even with the best and gentlest possible handling, your hair will sustain at least a bit of damage just from age. Masking that damage and enabling your hair to be strong, smooth, and easy to handle despite damage is the whole point of any product, after all. If you don't want to "mask damage," then use nothing.

The D-Word: Dandruff

Dandruff. Yick. I've got it, I hate it. My hair is the hair I've wanted all my life, but left to its own devices, my scalp is ick. And I mean ick. Now, I'm not a dermatologist, so I can't diagnose or make individualized recommendations. What I can do is tell you what's worked for me and what hasn't.

I've come to the conclusion, based on the way my skin behaves otherwise, that thanks to my DNA, I simply exfoliate with great enthusiasm. I always have, and I always will. This isn't necessarily a bad thing since my skin also doesn't wrinkle easily and isn't dry at all. As a result, I've stopped trying to prevent my body from shedding its dead skin cells with quite so much verve and cheerfulness, and have instead focused on just making the stuff go away once it's been shed. If your dandruff is also stubborn and refuses to budge no matter what you do, you may also feel the same way. If it can't be cured, then how can it simply be dealt with? Accepting that my body will just exfoliate at the drop of a hat, how can I make the stuff just not stick around?

This turns it from a chemical or medical problem into a mechanical one -- and the solution is also mechanical. What's needed is something that simply carries the dandruff away. This puts us on the lookout for things that can be mooshed into the hair, that do not damage it or the scalp but nonetheless scrub up the flakes and carry them off.

I've found two things that work well: henna and salt scrubs. I'll treat them both separately.

Henna as dandruff treatment:

Henna is often said to have an astringent property that cuts down on dandruff, but I've come to the conclusion that it simply functions as a non-slippery, non-dissolving physical carrier that grabs onto the flakes and, when rinsed out, carries them off. Normal things like shampoo and conditioner are too slippery and smooth; they coat the hair, rinse out, and leave those pesky and sticky flakes behind, occasionally wrapped around individual strands of hair and unwilling to budge. Even dandruff shampoo simply dries everything out and leaves the flakes behind.

Henna however is essentially mud, a physical thing that when worked into the hair down to the roots, simply grabs onto the flakes and pulls them out by main force when it's rinsed out. (And henna takes work to rinse out.) As a mechanical remover of dandruff, absolutely nothing whatsoever beats henna -- or indigo, or cassia (neutral henna).

Now, my own hair is so dark that henna and indigo, when used together, don't change the color much at all aside from tanking the ever-increasing number of greys that I have. Even henna doesn't do much to change the color unless it's in direct sunlight, upon which point a strong, deep, red glow can be seen. If you don't care for the strong reddish tone that henna leaves, you can combine it with indigo for a brown or black tone, or else simply use neutral henna otherwise known as cassia obovata, which will condition your hair and scalp, remove your dandruff entirely, and deposit no color.

And again, I should stress that the coloring properties of henna aren't what kills off the flakes -- it's the simple physical nature of working a non-dissolving, muddy, ever so slightly grainy goop into your hair straight down to the roots, letting it sit, and then rinsing it out with great thoroughness. And unlike dandruff shampoo, which will turn your hair into hay, henna, henna+indigo, and cassia are all quite conditioning and will leave you with no flakes and better hair. It's one of the few win-win situations in life. :-)

Salt scrubs as dandruff treatment:

If even a titch of color isn't for you, then by far the best treatment is a simple salt scrub made of table salt and coconut oil. The table salt has a small enough grain size that it won't damage your hair or scalp, unlike sea salt, which is a bit too gritty and jagged. We don't care about the chemical or mineral make-up of the salt here; all we want is a dissolvable, cheap granular stuff to physically scrub up the dandruff. I imagine sugar would work as well, but I haven't tried it and have heard that it dissolves a bit too quickly to be useful.

At any rate, get a nice rounded tablespoon of coconut oil, the pure stuff that comes in tubs and is just barely a solid at room temperature. Pour a few tablespoons of salt into it, one at a time until you have as much salt as possible in it while still maintaining a somewhat creamy texture that you can pick up with your fingers.

While in the shower, lift up your hair and work this gunk right down to the roots. The scrubbing isn't the most wonderful sensation while you're doing it (it feels like sand), but just scrub relatively gently for what seems like a reasonable amount of time -- you aren't polishing granite, so don't overdo it, and you can always just scrub for more or less time as you see how it works for you. The coconut oil will not only condition your hair but it will also protect the salt from dissolving too quickly in the water.

Now ultimately, you do want the salt to dissolve and rinse away completely, so you'll have to do a lather-rinse-repeat with your shampoo when you're done. The shampoo must break up the coconut oil to allow the salt to rinse away, so the double-lather that you usually ignore when it's written on the label is actually necessary here. Keep going until you feel no grit in your hair whatsoever; rinse as thoroughly as possible. I also worked conditioner into my hair at the roots afterwards, which I typically don't do. (I usually only condition the ends.)

You'll want to experiment a bit to see what works in terms of time of scrubbing; always err on the side of scrubbing for too little time and too gently, because scrubbing too harshly or too long could harm your hair or scalp. But you should see a difference immediately.

Now, this won't cure the dandruff. It'll likely still come back. But to be honest, nothing cures serious dandruff. Like I said above, my skin exfoliates enthusiastically and my skin is oily, so a cure isn't really what I'm after. What I want is to be able to wear a black top or go to the Renaissance Faire and get a crown braid without cringing at what will be revealed when my hair is lifted up. If that's all you're after, this works a treat. Again, rinse thoroughly and scrub for as little time and as gently as possible.

What hasn't worked for me is the following:

Going coneless.

I haven't found that any single product is responsible for my dandruff. My scalp is not inflamed or sensitive; it simply exfoliates like mad. Some people do not, some people do. I'm on the "do" side of the scale. *shrug* I don't use much product anyway, so the standard advice -- no mousse, no gels, no hairspray, yadda yadda -- doesn't apply to me. If you, like me, have dandruff that simply will not quit, then switching away from commonly used products may not help. Give it a try, but if it doesn't give you the result you want, you may have to just let your body work by its own rules and deal with it rather than cure it.

Washing with even less frequency.

A lot of people swear by this, but I've found that it doesn't work for me. Many people who say that less washing helps are talking about washing "only" every three days or so. I'm already at a week to two weeks between washings, so that doesn't help me. Indeed, when I push it to two weeks, it appears to make things worse, and for a very simple reason. If my body is going to exfoliate, and the dandruff is going to happen -- which it will -- I simply have to get rid of it. Not washing will only allow it to build up on my scalp instead of being removed. Not showering or not using soap won't stop the rest of your skin from exfoliating; why would you expect that to work for your scalp?

You're welcome to give these sorts of things a try -- everyone's different and what works for one person may not work for the other. But again, if your dandruff is also just stubborn and won't go away, be prepared to let it happen and just scrub the blasted stuff up from time to time. I'm happy with that solution personally.

In Summary -- the Wrap-Up

So after that little digression, I've settled on the following routine, which works well for my coarse, dry, thick, wavy hair:

• Wash and condition every week with cone-laden shampoo and conditioner. Wash the roots, condition the ends.
• No heat treatment at all.
• Daily bunning or braids.
• Daily combing with a wide-tined detanging rake. No brushing at all.
• Maybe a nickel-sized dollop of silicone serum scented with an EO once a week at most -- more often not at all.
• Sleep with it braided but not tied off.
• Use the occasional salt scrub to remove dandruff when needed.

If your hair is sleeker or thinner than mine, you may have to wash more frequently and use an elastic to keep it in a sleep braid.

Again, it's close to extreme simplicity but not all the way there. If you enjoy a bit more fussiness and product than I (very likely), this may not interest you. In that case, I'd encourage you to do whatever you enjoy; long hair isn't worth it if you don't find it fun, and many people find the avoidance of product, fuss, and wearing it up all the time to be annoying.

I would still encourage you not to carpet-bomb your hair with a different treatment every night and then be disappointed when supermodel hair doesn't materialize instantly on your head. Never forget: Photoshop does wonders, and even the supermodels don't look like their photos. Love your hair and treat it gently, and it'll love you back and grow.