Is your hair feeling dry and damaged? No matter how much time you spend carefully researching and choosing a brand of shampoo and conditioner or avoiding heat treatment, if your water is hard, your hair will suffer. Regularly washing your hair in hard water is a recipe for disaster. That’s because hard water is full of minerals that weigh down your hair.
What is Hard Water?
Water picks up minerals when it passes through the ground and comes in contact with dirt and rocks. It picks up minerals like calcium, sulfates, and magnesium. If that water isn’t treated with a water softener, the water will stay hard. Minerals in water will remain unless you have additional filters on your system.
The Effect on your Household
This mineral buildup makes it much more difficult for soap to do its job and work up a lather. In fact, you may even notice this in your appliances, or when you do the dishes, wash your hands and body, or wash a load of laundry. In order to work up a lather, you’re forced to use more product.
The Effect on your Hair
Hard water wreaks havoc on your hair. Your individual strands of hair each have a shaft with a cuticle made of flat, overlapping cells (also called scales). Minerals cause the scales to stand up. When this happens, you will notice a change in the feel of your hair. Hair that was once sleek and soft may feel rough, frizzy, and unhealthy. You may also notice that it is easily tangled. Because working up a lather is more difficult with hard water, you may be using more shampoo and conditioner. However, not only is it harder to work up a lather when your water is weighed down with minerals, it’s harder to rinse out the soap too. This builds up in your hair and can mimic the appearance of dandruff.
Remedying Dry, Dull Hair
If you’re sick of dull, flat hair, there are ways to combat hard water. You may not be able to buy a water softener, but there are several other options that help smooth the cuticle so that the scales lie flat and the result is smooth, shiny hair. Depending on your circumstances, consult your stylist on simple home remedies or professional detoxifying and clarifying shampoos.
Contact Arbor Hair Studio to learn more!