5 Steps To Follow If You Want Stronger, Healthier Hair

It's not just split ends—between the blowout bars, regular dye jobs, and endless styling products on rotation, it's not so much a question of if your hair is damaged but instead how badly.

If you're washing your hair on the daily, rule No. 1 is to do so less often. Overwashing can be damaging for hair, especially if your hair is bleached, colored, or chemically treated. While different hair types have different needs, most haircare experts agree that shampooing only a few times a week is ideal. And it's not just because conventional shampoos can strip your hair and scalp of its oils, cause buildup, and throw its natural pH off balance: Hair is most vulnerable to damage and breakage when it's wet—period.

From the moment it gets wet, hair strands absorb water into its cortex, stretching and swelling the longer hair stays drenched. This causes the outer cuticle to lift and open (letting in even more water), and as hair dries, the cuticle is prone to crack, break, or stay lifted. If you have untamable frizz, or hair that feels rough to the touch, you can blame lifted cuticles from water absorption.

Which brings us to rule No. 2: Wash wisely. Prewashes (or pre-poos) are proof that we're getting smarter about our haircare routines. These typically oil-based treatments act as a nourishing first step in making hair hydrophobic, protecting and preventing strands from damaging water absorption.

We'll admit, brushing our hair might feel like the closest thing to an instant makeover, and it's probably the most intuitive haircare step of all. Just brush, right? The truth is, there's definitely a right and wrong way to do it. For starters, save your brush for dry hair (and keep the habit to once a day). If you must brush wet hair, use a wide-tooth comb, which can glide through wet hair much more gently and minimize snagging, especially if your hair is wavy or curly.

For obvious reasons, heat is not a friend of healthy hair2. The main thing to remember when blow drying, curling, or straightening hair with high temperatures is 1) keep it off the hottest setting, and 2) keep the tool moving. If a heat protectant isn't already in your arsenal, now's the time to stock up. And even better: If you can skip the heat styling altogether and give your hair a break, do it.

But what's not so obvious is that air drying your hair can be even more damaging than using a hair dryer safely (that's not a typo). Studies have found that while using a hair dryer can cause more surface damage than drying naturally, a continually moving hair dryer aimed 5 inches away actually causes less damage2 to the hair's cell membrane than air drying. This just goes to show how damaging waterlogged hair can be if left wet.