All you Lazy Bitches put your Hands in your Hair!

Actually, don't. You are probably just fucking it up by messing with it.

The Why: Studies show that men are highly attracted to long, lustrous hair.


Sneer this with me, please:

"Hair is dead, so how can I make mine 'Healthy'?"

Agreed. You are right, Ms. Sneer.

Note, however, that your nails are dead but if you drag them along stucco walls they will look rather less attractive. "Healthy" is another stupid BuyWord used by companies because it appeals to the Modern Makeup Moron. Replace it with "Pretty" and you've got a (more) honest ad.

You can't give dead keratin Health, but you can make it pretty. This can be achieved using some lovely products, or you can just stop doing the dumb shit that is actually fucking it up, or both. Don't be hurt - they lied to us! It isn't our fault, we've been trying our best, but everyone lied and told us ridiculous things about haircare and that's why your hair sucks.


The SparkNotes version:

Buy hair products with silicones in them (look in the ingredients for long ridiculous names that end up -cone or -xane. The higher up these ingredients are in the list, the better. That means the product has relatively more of them than other crap.)

Put coconut oil in your hair whenever you can afford to look like a filthy hobo. This Old Wives Tale stands out among the rest of them by virtue of being clinically tested and proven so many times that it is redundant.

Do not rough up your hair. Assiduously avoid combing it while it's wet, teasing it, scrunching it while you are shampooing, etc. Your hairs are fragile, and you can and do damage them significantly. Then they get resentful so they split their ends and break off and look shitty to spite you. Your hair is like a bitchy cat - don't pet it in the wrong direction, don't rough it up.




The Physical Hair and how you're fucking it over:

Each strand of your hair is like a long tree trunk, with shingle-like bark protecting its innards. These shingles ("cuticles") surround the delicate innards ("cortex") of the hairs to protect them from the harsh realities of life. Whenever you are rough with your hair (combing it while it's wet, teasing it, scrunching it while you are shampooing, etc) you are twisting and ripping off those bark-shingles. Now your hair strands will catch on each other like velcro and give your mane a beautiful Tangled look because you have turned your hair's protective bark into a million spiky little hooks with which to snag its fellow hairs.

Also, the bark protects the hair's innards ("cortex") which is very weak. If you fuck up the cuticles on a strand enough, the cortex is exposed and its a total weakling so a mere pull on that poor strand and it will break. Girls who find a handful of hairs in the brush each day, you have been unkind to your weak little cortexes by ripping off their protective cuticles.

Brushing your hair does nothing good for it. The old "brush your hair 100 times a day" thing is bullshit from when they had no good products, and it just kind of helped to distribute the natural hair oils over the hair and make it look shinier. Now we have far more pretty and effective products that will do the job better and WON'T fuck up your hair like crazy.

Unless you roll in dirt often, the only part of your hair that needs shampooing is the first inch near the scalp. Your hair appears "dirty" because the natural skin oils from your scalp have gotten onto the roots.

This is why dry shampoos (kind of) work: they are corn starch and talc, which absorb oil like crazy. When you sprinkle these powders onto your roots, they absorb the oil, and now you just have to brush out the disgusting now-oil-soaked-powder out of your hair to reveal "clean," oil-free roots. Yay. I don't love this method because it requires some effort, but if I am in a desperate situation (my hair looks gross and I have a date in ten minutes) I will use it and be grateful for it.

To "wash" the hair, you just need to remove this oil. Soap is the natural enemy of oil, so we use shampoo to lightly scrub the scalp and hair roots and wash away the offending greasiness. Shampooing the rest of your hair is largely unnecessary and kind of bad for it, since soap is an irritant and can damage the hair and leech out your hair color (if you dye your hair). So just gently but firmly rub your scalp with shampoo (like the massage they give you at the salon while they are washing it - actually, just pay attention to how they do it next time, they do it exactly right), and then just swipe the foam down the rest of your hair and rinse it off completely.

Conditioner's only purpose is the coat your hair with some slippery stuff to keep it from tangling up. It contains oily-type things that don't make the hair look greasy, but effective oil-up your hair and keep it from looking scruffy. This is almost completely unnecessary at the roots of your hair (it will actually speed up the looking-greasy-and-dirty process, since it is kind of a bunch of oils) so barely swipe the crown of your head with a tiny layer of conditioner. Massage a huge fucking handful, however, into the ends of your hair. This is where your trickster hairs like to rough-house and tangle up and look gross, so the slippy conditioner will make it hard for them to get tangled up in each other. Also, the ends of your hair have been around the longest, getting abused and beaten up, so this is where your split ends and rough hair is. Conditioner and other "smoothing products" (these are essentially conditioner) just coat this crappy portion of your hair, thus protecting it from further damage and make it look shiny to hide how trashy and straw-like it actually is.

Conditioner does not get "absorbed" into your hair. So letting it sit on your hair for 3 minutes, etc, is useless. They just say that because they (are bastards) don't trust you to gently work the conditioner all throughout your hair and get it coating every strand. This is easier if you splash a handful of water on your conditioner-filled hair and then start massaging. Massage DOWN the shaft of the hair, in the direction that the cuticles naturally lay. Do not attempt to rip your fingers through your matted hair (it wouldn't be matted if you shampooed it properly instead of piling on your head and scrubbing), just massage the conditioner into your hair, and splash more water and more conditioner on as necessary. You can use your fingers to gently separate and comb through your hair, but this shouldn't be a difficult thing if your hair wasn't all matted and tangled up by the shampooing process.

Hey, listen, I'm not judging here. I used to take a comb into the shower with me and comb my conditioner-laden hair to rip the tangles out, which were EVERYWHERE because I was a pile-and-scrub shampoo-er. My hair looked like straw, and this process hurt and took forever. And when I say "used-to" I mean, like, a month ago.

When you rinse out the conditioner, just rinse the crown/roots thoroughly. The rest of your hair would love to keep the conditioner on it. As I said, its the same damn formulation as your "shine" and "de-frizz" products, which you are supposed to leave in. I always apply conditioner to my (wet OR dry) hair ends when I find myself without my other smoothing creams. I have literally put a HANDFUL of conditioner in the last foot of my hair (while it was soaking wet) and just left it in there. It dried into very nice looking curls.

Turn off the water. Now your hair is soaking. But you CAN'T TWIST IT to remove the water,  nor can you PULL it. You're just kinda screwed here. I SQUEEZE the worst of the water out of my hair, then use a microfiber (read: AMAZING HEAVENLY CLOTH THAT EATS WATER) towel to press against my hair and this removes a lot of the rest of the water.

Now your hair is damp. If you didn't wash out much conditioner, then you have lovely protective oils coating most of your hair. This is good, because heat fucks up your hair. If you washed out all the conditioner (>:( stop that now) then you can put practically any product in your hair to protect it from the pain you are about to inflict on it with your blowdryer and evil straightener. Silicones are, once again, a miracle here. "Smoothing," "de-frizzing", "sleekening" products are all perfect. Do not put them on the crown of your head though, cuz it will make it look greasy. A light coat of hair spray would be good for that spot (or a "volumizing mousse" which freaking never work for me). So coat your hair in some kind of protective chemicals, and then you can blast it with heat. But honestly, super high heat isnt that necessary. Medium is usually sufficient, and then use cold air to set the hairdo. (Cold makes the cuticles close up, which is always good).




"What treatments and products should I use to repair my hair?" Yeaahhh, bad news on that one. Pretty much nothing can repair your hair because *ahem* your hair is fucked up because you ripped off all its protective shingles, exposed its tender cortex, which promptly disintegrated and either broke off or turned into split ends or hung around looking shitty and straw-like. I mean, how do you propose repairing that? You can try to heal the cortex (only coconut oil appears to be able to do this - it has the unique triglyceride chain structure that can penetrate the cortex and bond with the structure inside), or you can try to come up with a cuticle-substitute to protect the battered remains of the cortex. Oils, silicones, protein etc, do this. Every "smoothing," "de-frizz," "shine" etc product is just trying to coat your hair and protect it like the cuticles used to.

You can see, then, that while there are a few amazing hair care ingredients that will make your hair waaaay easier to style and nicer to touch, mostly the products are there to make up for the damage you caused to your hair (btw, UV radiation -sunlight- is apparently bad for your hair too. That just seems like whining to me, though, so for now I am ignoring it. I guess I should just drop a tablespoon of sunscreen into my conditioner. I read that works.)

So don't feel bad about your past hair-abuse. You were lied to and misled. And within a couple years you will have BRAND NEW HAIR that you have hopefully fucking up less this time around. In the meantime, some easy, cheap products will fool everyone into thinking your hair is actually "Healthy" instead of the diseased, crying wreck that it is.

Great products:

• Aussie 3 Minute Miracle Deeeeeeep Moisture conditioner/treatment bla bla. Chock full of silicones. Don't need to leave it on for 3 minutes, just need to massage it completely through your hair. Remember, its all about coating the strands.
• Almost all shampoos suck. Srsly, even the expensive ones. Suave Professionals Sleek shampoo has gentler soaps and some nice oils in it, so I am happy with that.
• Coconut oillllllllllllllllllllll. It is solid at room temperature, so you have to heat it up in the microwave or just massage a lump in your hands and it will turn into a liquid. Put that in your hair BEFORE you wash it (preferably for a long time, like for as many hours as possible - but you will look like a disgusting hobo, remember). Great as it would be for your hair to always have coconut oil in it, it is super greasy and you will look grrrooooosss. Always wash it out. I guess, like, a TINY bit in the VERY tips of your hair would be fine, and a pretty good idea since that is the most crappy, damaged hair.
• Any "smoothing" "sleekening" "defrizz" spray or cream with a ton of silicones as the main ingredient. CitreShine's Shine Spray is GREAT for tangly hair, Sally's beauty supply sells a generic version of Redken Antisnap which is very good, Sally's own line ("Beyond the Zone", stupid name) has "Gettin' Creamed" (stupid name) which is awesoooome.