Hair Basics

The two following facts are the ones you must understand to take better care of your hair:

1. Hair is dead (notice that when you cut hair, you don't say ouch), and once it has been damaged it cannot be repaired in any way, shape, or form. Repeated blow drying, brushing, styling, chemical processing, and sun exposure degrades hair, and the damage cannot be mended or undone.

2. Hair has a particular genetic or hormonally generated nature; you can work with it and spend time controlling it, and find products that simulate a different feel, but you cannot change how it grows. Perms, straighteners, and dyes can make a drastic change in the appearance of your hair (and there are definite negative consequences to these processes), but the effects grow out, and that's an entirely different story from thinking that some quality of your hair can be altered for good.

The pursuit of products that will finally make your dream hair come true is endless. What most women desire and hope for is that they will find a product line (at any cost) that will make thick, heavy hair lighter and fuller; thin hair thicker and fuller; curly, frizzy hair straighter and smoother; straight hair curlier; coarse hair silkier; and on and on and on. Whatever it is you want to hear, the hair-care industry is willing to tell you. To name just a handful of claims: Overprocessed, completely destroyed hair can somehow be brought back to life. Split ends can be mended into a harmonious whole. Frizzy manes can be miraculously transformed into flowing, silky waves. Thin hair can be made thick. Dandruff can be cured. And dyeing hair won't cause damage. Is any of this possible? I know you want me to say "yes" unequivocally, but the truth is that the answer is both yes and no.

Primarily, what you can expect depends less on the products you use and far more on the actual texture and structure of your hair, how adept you are at wielding styling tools, and how much time and trouble you are willing to go through to achieve the desired results. And that all varies from hair type to hair type and from person to person.

For example, if you have thin, limp hair you can do only so much to change how thick it can really feel or how full it can really look. Most of the products that simulate (notice I said simulate and not create) a thick feel can also build up and make the hair appear limp and sticky. Likewise, products that help hold the hair aloft for an appearance of fullness can leave a film on the hair. If your hair is coarse and naturally frizzy, flat irons (with the right products) can work temporary miracles—but you can't change the nature of your hair over the long term without straightening it.

Now that you know what you can't expect, here's what you can expect. There are wonderful products on the market that can temporarily, washing to washing, do some fairly incredible things to hair. Several ingredients can produce amazing results, from filling in the holes and tears in damaged hair cuticles to imparting a silky-smooth texture to the rough sections of the hair shaft. Many ingredients can, to some extent, be absorbed by the hair shaft to help make the hair feel soft and manageable. Conditioners and shampoos can deposit temporary color on the hair to extend the life of your hair dye between touch-ups. Advances in sprays, gels, styling creams, and mousses allow deftly formed styles to be kept in place with a relative amount of softness and ease of brushing.

Does this have to be expensive? Absolutely not. As I get more into actual product formulations you will be shocked at how the same basic ingredients appear over and over again in hair-care products. In the world of skin care, cosmetics chemists have thousands of different ingredients at their disposal from which they can create a vast array of products with an almost limitless range of textures and performance traits. Hair-care formulations by comparison do not have that scope. There is only a mere handful of ingredients that can clean hair or condition it. Hair is very specific about what will cling to it and what you can use to clean it. The truly insane disparity in the prices of products from different lines in no way reflects differences in the products. Again, the information is all there on the ingredient list.

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