Hard Water 101 - How To Remove Hard Water Buildup On Curly Hair

Is your hair looking very dull and frizzy, or does it feel brittle and hard and you're struggling to get it moisturized, or maybe your curls aren't springing up like they used to well, you might have hard water build up if you're new to my channel welcome my Name is gina, and here we talk all things naturally curly. I love doing simplified, step-by-step tutorials, talking about the science of hair product ingredients and much more and if you're a returning viewer. Thank you so much for coming back to my channel for today's video. I'M going to walk you through what is hard water, build up on your hair, how to tell if you have hard water buildup and how to tell if you don't have hard water build up, and you might just have another hair problem going on we're also going To do a step-by-step routine, to show you how to remove hard water buildup on your hair, so you can start fresh and get your curls bouncy and shiny again. So let's go ahead and get started hard. Water is when water contains naturally occurring elements such as calcium and magnesium. Those are the most common and although these minerals are not harmful to us in any way, they can cause issues on the hair because they actually bind to the hair. These minerals mostly bind to the outer layer of the hair, so the hair is cuticle, but they have been shown to also appear on the inner layers of the hair, like the cortex, the more damage that you have on your hair or the more high porosity that Your hair is it's more likely to get build up not only from products but also from minerals and hard water. So here are some of the signs of hard water buildup in your hair. The first is the way that it feels it might feel stiff and brittle and just really unmanageable, and it also might appear more dull and lacking shine and vibrancy, and it can also appear very frizzy because of this stiff, unmanageable feeling. You might also experience more breakage on your hair and it's just overall really hard to manage. You also might notice that your shampoos don't lather up depending on the cleansing agents or the surfactants that are in your shampoo. You also might notice a very sticky unpleasant feeling. After you finish, shampooing your hair, or you don't feel like your hair - got very clean after shampooing and also conditioner might not even make it feel better. So if you're shampooing your hair and it's not lathering up and then you apply conditioner and the conditioner doesn't even make it feel softer or you don't notice much of a difference, then you could have hard water build up. You might also notice that your curls are just not springing up as much so you don't have the same curl retention as you normally do. You also might notice that your products and your conditioners are just not absorbing you're not able to get that moisture into the inner layers of your hair. If you have all those minerals sitting on the surface and causing that buildup and another common sign of hard water buildup is, you can actually get a discoloration in your hair color if you are blonde or if you have silver and gray hair, you might notice a Orange or kind of a bronze or a coppery undertone to your hair. So now, let's talk about some of the common misdiagnosis when it comes to having hard water and what you might be mistaking hard water buildup for and it could be another problem. The first and most common one is having low porosity hair. If you just have low porosity, hair or if your hair is just very healthy and you have a tightly bound cuticle, that's not really raised at all. It might struggle to let moisture in, and so you have to do a lot of deep conditioning with penetrating ingredients and incorporating heat in your deep conditioning to help those deep conditioners absorb into your hair, because the cuticle is naturally much tighter. So the difference between having low porosity hair and having hard water buildup is with hard water buildup. Your shampoos are not lathering and you're, not able to moisturize your hair at all. So that would be the difference. So if you're, somebody that has low porosity hair but your shampoos work, fine, you get a fine, lather and you're able to condition your hair and your hair feels soft. Then you don't have hard water buildup, it's just low porosity hair, which just takes a little bit more work, some time to get moisturized, so low, porosity hair as long as you're moisturizing it properly. It should not feel super brittle and it also shouldn't feel very dry if you're doing regular, deep conditioning treatments, the other big difference is low. Porosity hair is very shiny because of that tightly bound cuticle. If you had hard water buildup, your hair is definitely not going to be shiny. Naturally, so, if you let your hair dry product, free and you're, not seeing any shine, then that could be build up or you could have high porosity. Hair products definitely create shine on your hair, so you really need to look at your hair without any product and just let it air dry product free to really assess it. The next common misdiagnosis is just having product build up on your hair. This is super common and i get product build up all the time because a lot of our curly hair products, even if they're silicone free they contain poly quads, they contain butters and oils and all kinds of ingredients that are meant to bind to the hair. That'S what they do and they can build up over time if you're not using a good cleansing shampoo. So the difference between a product build up and hard water buildup is with regular product buildup you're able to remove that with just a good cleansing, shampoo or clarifying shampoo. So your basic lathering, shampoo or shampoo that just says clarifying. You should be able to recover from that product, build up use that shampoo, get a good, lather and then deep condition and style, your hair, like usual, and it should be back to normal. If you had hard water buildup, you can use all the clarifying shampoos. Do all the deep conditioning treatments and your curls still won't look right, so that's the main difference is hard. Water buildup requires a chelating shampoo, which we'll talk about in a minute, which is a different type of shampoo compared to a regular clarifying shampoo which is designed to just be used for product buildup. The next common misdiagnosis is having protein overload and i would say this is probably the hardest to decipher between protein overload and hard water buildup, because they have almost identical symptoms. Protein overload a lot of times your hair will look very stringy and just look very limp. It doesn't curl up it snaps easily. It feels very brittle, it's definitely a feeling in your hair and it also doesn't look great either, but the main way to tell between the two is just think about the products that you've been using. It check the labels. Have you been using a very protein heavy routine back to back? Did you do a bunch of protein treatments and you didn't need it, but if you know that you've been using a balance routine or you haven't been doing anything crazy when it comes to protein, then it could be hard water build up. So that's the main difference is just assessing what products you've been using lately and protein overload can also be fixed pretty easily, with just doing a clarifying shampoo, a good moisturizing, deep conditioner, that's protein free and then using some protein free stylers. It might take a couple times of doing that, depending on how severe your protein overload is, but it can be recovered, whereas, as i mentioned before, with hard water buildup, you can't just use a regular clarifying shampoo that doesn't usually do the trick. So if you've rolled out all these things and you're still having the same issues, then it's likely hard water build up. If you know that you have hard water in your home, so how can you tell if you have hard water in your home? The easiest thing to do is take a look at your faucets. Look at your shower head, look up underneath of your faucet and if you see a lot of white residue i'll put some photos up here on the screen that i found online. Just of what this looks like you tend to get a white powdery buildup on a lot of your things that have water just like sitting or dripping water. So you might notice it like on your bath drain. If it's dark, you might see some white residue and it's really hard to get that off, and sometimes you can even get like a coppery finish on your bathtub. Even that's kind of hard to remove it's very hard to get off, because this stuff really sticks to everything. The next way to really tell is you can look up online at your water treatment center. If you are on city or county water and ask them - or you can look it up online to see if hard water is common in your area, there are several maps online too. I'M not sure how accurate these are, but you can look at certain maps too, and you can probably narrow it down to your county level or your city level to see if that area tends to have hard water, because different areas of the country have different types Of water, just based on the natural rocks and stuff that are under the ground and the most reliable way to tell, is to get an actual test done. So you can have your water tested, just look up water testing at centers and you can send in a sample. You can test for other things, but hard water is one of the things that you can get tested. There'S also at-home test kits, i'm not sure how reliable those are, but that is another option that you could look into. We actually had our water tested here when we moved into this new house that we built a couple years ago and we had it tested, because we wanted to see if we needed to install a softener, because a lot of people in our area have hard water. I live in a very rural area, so we have well water so we're not on like county or city water. It'S just pure water out of the mountain here, which is great, but you know you don't have control over what is coming out of it. That way. So it's good to get it tested for things like bacteria and other stuff. So that's why we had the test done originally and it came back as not really being hard, but it was almost on the borderline of being hard. So i know that i might need to check it again in the future, because i've also heard that that can change over time, like the more that it gets built up in your pipe. So if they're new, it might not be hard at first and then you might want to check it again in a few years. I'M not sure, but at the moment we don't have super hard water, but i know that there are some minerals in our water, because i noticed some of that white residue in certain areas of our home. So now, let's jump into the actual routine, where i'm going to show you how to remove it and how to reset your hair step by step. So in order to remove hard water, buildup you're going to want a chelating shampoo. This is the one i'm going to be using today. This is from malibu c. I picked this up on amazon, it's the undu goo ph 9 shampoo, which is a high ph. So you wouldn't want to use this too often, because you don't want to draw out your hair, but this is formulated with some other milder surfactants and i think it is still sulfate free. So it's not going to make your hair too dry as long as you don't use it too often, and we're going to be following up with a deep conditioner today, so my hair has been fine. They also have a hard water wellness shampoo, and i almost wish i had gotten that one, because that's what i was trying to do is get a shampoo for hard water, and i ended up just ordering this one. I didn't notice that they had two different ones, but this one i did check. It does still contain ingredients that do remove hard water buildup. So i'm going to list here on the screen, the ingredients that you want to look for, but one of the most recognizable things is edta. So you want to look for that. So there's disodium edta tetrasodium edta, but i heard it with that one that you want to make sure that it's a little bit higher up on the list because a lot of times you will see that towards the end of lots of different products, and that's not Necessarily for hard water buildup, that's just along with some other preservatives and stuff. So i heard that with that one, you got to make sure that it's a little bit higher up, so it doesn't have to be this one. In particular, this is just one of the most popular ones. I'Ve also heard about one from the brand ion that's available at sally beauty. I believe they have a shampoo and maybe some treatments as well, so those are two of the most common, like salon type of treatments that you can use to remove hard water, but you can also get them at home, so this is from amazon. I will link it for you in the description box down below, so i did do a pre-poo treatment first before shampooing, and mainly to just help dry detangle, my hair, i didn't want to have any breakage or my hair to get too dried out with this. That'S another good thing with doing a pre-poo treatment is it can reduce? How harsh a shampoo is because it kind of coats the hair and protects the hair. So if you're worried about this shampoo or another chelating shampoo drying out your hair, then you might want to consider doing either a pre-poo treatment or using a conditioner beforehand. I actually do both, usually in my routine, so i definitely did that for this routine. So when i first got in the shower, i used a conditioner. I'M just testing out this one right now from mop top. It does really good at detangling, but you can use any conditioner that you have. You really just need something. That'S going to help soften the hair and help you detangle. That way, you don't end up with a matted mess when you shampoo, then i'm going in and shampooing, and it feels pretty moisturizing like as i'm shampooing, but with this shampoo, when you rinse it out, you definitely need conditioner afterwards. It can feel kind of like not sticky, but you know you can tell that you've got a really deep cleanse and you definitely need conditioner afterwards, but it lathers up really nicely a little. Definitely goes a long way. You want to make sure that you really take some time to scrub your scalp make sure it really gets down in there, and you do want to take this shampoo all the way down the lengths of your hair that way you're fully cleansing it. Don'T just do your roots, like you want to make sure to clean your entire hair. You can add some more water to increase the lather and you can also use a scalp scrubber if you want, but you don't want to be too harsh on your hair or cause breakage. So i like this one from mania beauty, because it's really soft and flexible then i actually did the double cleanse method, which is just where you go in a second time with shampoo after you rinse it out, and this is actually really good. If you have a lot of build up because the first time the shampoo is removing that buildup and stuff and the second time you get a better cleanse. So if you're really struggling or if you know you have a ton of build up, you might want to consider double cleansing even for your regular shampoo routine, but definitely for this. If you do feel like you have a lot of it. So then, after rinsing it out, i definitely felt like my hair was squeaky clean and i felt like i needed conditioner immediately. So that's fine for every once in a while, but as i mentioned, you wouldn't want to do this too often and because of the high ph you do get that feeling in your hair because it has lifted the cuticle and that's actually how it's able to cleanse. It'S not going to be lifting your cuticle too much. You wouldn't want to do that every single time you shampoo, but this is going to lift it to allow it to fully cleanse the hair and then you're going to lower it back down with that conditioner. So the conditioner brings your hair back down to a lower ph, that's more acidic, closer to your natural scalp oil. So that's why you always want to follow up with conditioner. You don't want to leave your cuticle in that raised position. That'S just going to cause! So much more frizz and breakage, so i just went back in with that mop top conditioner, but i'm going to be deep conditioning. I really just did this in order to remove the loose hairs, and just so i didn't have too much of a mess. So i could wrap my hair up and get out of the shower and do a deep conditioning treatment. I would rather just go straight to a deep conditioner, but because i didn't have it in the shower and i wanted to be able to use a heat cap, i'm going to just do that when i get out. So i wrapped up my hair and got out of the shower, and then i applied my deep conditioning treatment. I'M testing out the ag hair product, so i'm going to test out this mask from aj hair. So far so good, it was very thick super moisturizing i'll. Keep you all posted on how i like this brand. You want to make sure you fully coat your hair too, in deep conditioner like make sure that you get your roots and everything just fully rinse it out and make sure you get it fully rinsed out. If you're worried about your hair getting way down but at least apply your conditioner all the way to the root, because you don't want to leave the hair at the root in that raised position either you want to make sure that you're getting everything lowered back down. So you don't have any frizz or anything like that, so then to really amp up the deep conditioning i'm going to use this heated cap from hot head, it's from thermal hair care. I can link it for you down below you basically pop this in the microwave. It just gets it warm and then you can put it on over your plastic cap and that heat is really going to help increase the penetration of the deep conditioner. So if you have very low porosity hair you're going to want to do this every time you deep condition to make sure it can fully soak in, but if i'm really in need of a good treatment. This is something that i'll do every once in a while. So then, after rinsing out the deep conditioner, my hair felt so much better. I let it sort of just air dry a little bit, so i can make sure that it was fully cleaned and it looked a lot better and it definitely looked a hundred times better. So then, for your styling products, you want to offer some products that have a lot of moisture. Obviously, look for products that have a lot of slip in them, because, if you've been struggling with that stiff, brittle feeling from hard water buildup, then you're definitely going to want to use some styling products afterwards. That have a lot of slip. Look for products with lots of moisture lots of oils to really help soften the hair, and i would maybe also go protein free as well, in your deep conditioner and in your styling products, or maybe at least in your deep conditioner, because protein can lend to a Stiffer feeling so, if you're really trying to recover from that hard water buildup, maybe lay off the protein for this particular routine and then work it back into your future wash days. So there are also some diy rinses that are said to remove hard water buildup like vinegar, citric acid or lemon juice, but i don't typically recommend those just because you can't control the ph level of it. I mean you can dilute it with some water, but at the same time you wouldn't want to use something. That'S too acidic, you don't want to damage your hair either. So for me, it's a lot easier to just use a shampoo, that's designed to be a chelating shampoo and then i know it's really going to remove that hard water buildup, but you could try it out if you really are desperate and you don't have a chelating Shampoo on hand, but i do love how you can get this on amazon, prime or you could head to sally beauty and get the ion one that i mentioned so now. Let'S just talk about some maintenance like how do you maintain it? If you have hard water in your home, i would recommend doing a chelating shampoo like this, about one to two times a month, just depending on how often you wash your hair or how severe your hard water is. You could also stop using your water to do your final rinse. Some people, i know, use distilled water to rinse their hair after they're shampooing. To me, that's a lot of maintenance. I don't want to have to buy that and keep jugs sitting around and stuff, but if you're really desperate, you could try that, because you know in theory, if you're doing all of this to remove it and then you're just continuing to wash your hair with the Same water, it's just going to happen again, so it could be a lot to kind of maintain. So maybe that's something to consider, but the best option is to actually install a softener system in your home. So this is where it's going to actually soften the water. Before it even comes into your faucets into your shower head, that's obviously the more pricey option, but that's the long-term solution to actually getting it right, and that might be a better option too, because you don't want to end up with that buildup happening on your appliances. Clogging up you know the water spigot on your fridge, there's lots of different things that it can affect. Even your washing machine, your clothes, so it can just be a pain dealing with it. So that would be the best solution to fix all of the problems that hard water can cause. They also make shower head filters, but a shower head filter is not going to soften your water. That'S just filtering out, like actual particles, so make sure you don't confuse a water filter with a softener, because that is a completely different thing. A softener actually adds salts to the water to make it softer. So you need to have that salt system in place to be able to soften your water. Just a shower head. A filter is not going to do the trick. They do, however, make some softener systems for your shower head, but i've read it that they don't always work the best. There was one that i did come across. That is supposed to be pretty effective. You have to actually change out the salt cartridge or you have to add salt to it, and some people say they have to do it as much as once a week depending on how hard your water is. So that could be a lot of maintenance as well, but that might be cheaper than an entire house system. But you could look into that as well and i'll link you to it down below, as well as the sources that i use for this research and also the article that i read about that particular softener for your shower head. So don't worry if you didn't take notes, i'm going to summarize all of this information for you over on the blog post that goes with this video and that will be linked in the description box down below. So if you like this video, you might also want to check out the one that i did all about the common causes of build up on your hair, and we also talked about how to properly remove buildup, so product buildup and some other common causes of buildup And how to prevent it? So i'll put the video linked here on the screen, and i will talk to you over there.