5 Stupid-Easy Ways To Prevent Hair Damage

Damaged hair is one of the worst things in the world. Once you have it, it’s really hard to get rid of. Additionally, in today’s world of flat-ironing and hair color, it’s really easy to damage your hair. However, there are a few basic things you can do to prevent hair damage from inconveniencing you in the first place and I want to share them with you…

1. Limit Hot Tools To Prevent Hair Damage

Speaking from experience, it sucks to go to work without styled hair. I love nothing more than to wash, blow-dry, and straighten my hair before I go to work. This used to be my everyday routine until I realized how much it was damaging my hair. I even have a bunch of small pieces in my hair that broke off from heat damage.

Most people’s hair can probably handle a lot more abuse than mine can since my hair is so fine. I also just went through a lot of chemical processing last year before my wedding. When you pair all of this with the fact that I was styling my hair every day for work, it was a recipe for disaster.

Nowadays, I try to make my hair look as professional as possible without using heat. Sometimes I will let it air-dry in rollers. Other days I may only blow-dry a little at the roots to give it lift. I also wear it up a lot. I just try really hard to keep the heat-styling to special occasions. When I do style my hair, I make sure to use a protecting spray.

2. Don’t Over-Color

This is the root of all my hair damage problems. I’ve gone from blonde to black to blonde back to brown back to blonde. There was a point in time where I let my hair go dark and left it alone, which did give it a break. I rarely colored it, and when I did, I used semi-permanent colors. The problem was that for my wedding, I wanted to have blonde hair since that’s what I like the best. Even though I went blonde with several processes and didn’t do platinum blonde again, it still took a toll on my hair. The first few processes called for bleach over bleach which caused a lot of breakage.

Now that I want to stay blonde, I have a lot of my natural hair color going through the blonde. This allows me to wait longer in between processes. My hairstylist also doesn’t rebleach the damaged parts since they are so fragile.

My advice to you to prevent hair damage is to pick a color and stick with it. Maybe, if a few years down the road, you decide you want a change, give it a shot. But don’t color your hair over and over again.

3. Loosen Up

Tight braids and ponytails are no way to prevent hair damage. When you wear your hair in ultra-tight hairstyles, they will pull the hair so much that it will break right off. It also probably won’t be a clean break, so there will be a lot of room for split ends to travel up the hair strand.

Nowadays, loose braids and other loose hairstyles are really trendy. I would try to go for something like that instead of tight cornrows. Read more about the different types of braids.

Also, alternating where you put your ponytail, braid, etc. is a good idea to prevent hair damage. Try alternating between high, low and medium ponytails; your hair will thank you.

4. Communicate With Your Hairstylist

A really common problem that I have seen countless times as a hairstylist is when your customer will not tell you what is on their hair. They will say that their hair has never been colored when in fact it has been bleached and recolored back to their natural color. Just because your hair looks like your natural color, it doesn’t mean that it won’t react negatively to whatever I am going to do to your hair. And trust me, we know when you are bending the truth.

Let’s say that you used a box dye from Wal-Mart to recolor your bleached hair back to your natural color and that brand uses metallic compounds in their dye. When I put bleach on your hair, it may cause the dye on their to burn your hair (no joke… I’ve seen it happen).

Another problem is that I might put color on your hair, thinking it is virgin hair, and it will color your roots perfectly but will turn the rest of your hair orange, leaving you with hot roots.  I’ve seen this happen too. Now your hair has to endure many more processes and you have to pay a lot more money for corrective color. This all could have been avoided if you just communicated with your hairstylist.

5. Stay Trimmed

I know that I have talked about this a million times in my previous articles but it is so true. The only way to get rid of split ends is to cut them off. If you do not trim your hair every so often, your split ends will continue to split higher and higher, causing your hair to break. When your split ends get this bad, it is a lot harder to prevent hair damage. It would have been much easier if you just had your hair trimmed every 4-6 weeks.

Your Turn: Are there any other tips you can think of to prevent hair damage? Do you practice any of these tips? I’d love to read your feedback in the comments section below…