Your hair and health

Lack of protein in your diet will affect the colour of your hair. Lower amounts of protein will change th color from black to orangey red. Healthy hair can be effected by poor nutrition. Don't neglect protein in your diet. 

Summary of hair damage

The stump of a hair that has been badly cut

Bubbles formed within hair as a result of water boiling within the cortex

Minimising damage

Once it has been significantly damaged, the cuticle cannot be repaired. So hair care must be aimed at preventing injury in the first place. Obviously, all procedures should therefore be carried out as gently as possible. Apart from this, the best way to keep damage to a minimum is to condition regularly and thoroughly. This helps to keep the cuticle intact, lower friction and reduce static charge on the hair.
    Conditioners that contain dimethicone (a silicone compound, made from silica which is one of the commonest substances on earth) deposit mainly at the edges of the cuticle scales - just where the damage happens most easily. Micro-fine droplets make the hair surface

This is African hair (as indicated by the groove along its length): this type of hair, more than any other, needs the protection of conditioning

smooth and shiny (less 'fly-away')- Dimethicone protects the hair from damage by reducing its resistance to brushing, combing and styling, when wet as well as when dry.
    Other ingredients in conditioners and other hair care preparations also work to smooth the outer layers of the cuticle. These may include protein extracts (collagen, and the amino acids obtained from silk) and panthenol and similar compounds, which are related to vitamin B5. Some of these are known to penetrate hair and to help to increase its moisture content. Well-conditioned hair is quite easy to de-tangle. Use a large-toothed comb or brush with rounded ends.
    The only way to avoid split ends altogether is to use preventive conditioning and to avoid all chemical treatments. Split ends, if they do develop, can never be repaired 'like new'. The so-called 'split end repair fluids' are applied


A split end that has been temporarily repaired

directly to the hair tips. They contain high-density silicone fluids which draw the splayed ends of the fibres together and hide their ragged appearance. The fluid is removed at the next shampoo, however.

Severe cosmetic damage

Hair that has been badly damaged by cosmetic treatments is surprisingly common. Of course, stylists and technicians are trained to examine hair before carrying out chemical treatment to determine its porosity, and whether there is any possibility of serious damage. But take an enthusiastic amateur embarking on bleaching and perming at home without any basic knowledge or experience, and combine this with a hair dryer used on its hottest setting: you have a recipe for disaster.
    Here are a couple of all-too-familiar examples of severe cosmetic damage. Both of them can be avoided by treating the care with the care it deserves.

Trichorrhexis nodosa
This is an explosion of the cortex at a single point on the hair. It looks like a tiny white bead on the hair, and can lead to hair breakage. It is a classic sign of cosmetic and chemical over-treatment of the hair. So its appearance should always prompt the thought, 'What is this person doing to the hair more than the rest of us are doing?

A case of trichorrhexis nodosa, where the cortex was disrupted by an overheated hair dryer

 

The hair has literally been fried by heat, and then burst open

  

A heat-damaged hair seen under the microscope

Perm damage
A permanent wave process inexpertly applied is probably the most damaging chemical treatment that hairdressers see. This photograph (top right) shows the effect of excessive waving treatment. The cuticle scales on the hair have been lifted up and separated from each other. They will never return to normal, and as soon as a comb passes over them they may break off. The cuticle may be completely stripped off, revealing the cortex underneath. This too is now exposed to weathering, and will probably not survive unbroken for long.
   When a new client walks into a salon, the hairdresser never knows what problems are going to face them. A quick assessment reveals whether the client is Caucasian, African, or Asian descent: all these different racial types have different hair qualities and different hair structures. Is this client's hair curly or straight? Dry, greasy or normal? or perhaps of a mixed type? Is it long or short? Thick or thin, in terms of its density on the head? Are the fibres coarse, medium or fine? All these characteristics interact with each other.

   Hair that has been repeatedly permed    

   

  The effects of repeated bleaching, together with unfortunately   poor styling

   And then, what is the past history of this hair? Has it been permed or bleached, or possibly both?
    No two clients are the same. Life in a salon is never dull!

What the eye doesn't see - the good, the bad and the ugly - is made plain by the electron microscope

Knotting, associated with African hair... ... leads to breakdown  A perfect hair, its cuticle  intact, taken from a  newborn baby        Damaged cuticle, due to backcombing heavily   sprayed hair                                                                        A hair shattered after severe perm                                                                        damage

Hair damage caused by hair bands

This is the kind of damage that is caused to African hair by the use of chemical relaxants

Kalista Salon & Day Spa - We want everyone to know this information to educate yourselves when getting your hair done by just any hairdresser. We are well awair of the risks in styling, cutting, coloring hair and that is why even though you want to have these services done anyway, it is wise to go to the ones that are aware that your hair can be damaged so we can work hard to avoid the least possible damage.

More fun facts-- my fav!!! Now why don't you use a flat iron on wet hair! You know the commercials that talk about using a flat iron on your hair Wet or Dry. DON'T DO IT, Here is why.

A classical case of bubble hair

Bubble hair

People will tell you that their bubble hair 'just happened', quite suddenly, after they had been doing the same things to their hair for a long time. Then all at once they noticed tiny 'bubbles' in the ends of their hair.
  Invariably, bubble hair is caused by some kind of heating appliance, most often curling irons.

These operate somewhere between 120 and 180 °C, roughly speaking. Water boils at 100 °C. If a hot curling iron is put on to wet hair, it boils the water inside the hair. The boiling water softens the keratin of the cortex; then the steam from the boiling water expands and forms tiny bubbles inside the hair. Eventually the hair breaks off, either at or somewhere near a bubble.
    Every woman who has used curling irons knows that they work better on some days than others. One day she may have them just a little hotter than usual: that might be just enough to cause bubble hair, and for the affected hair to break off.
    Although the sufferer usually claims that her hair was perfectly normal until she changed the hair product she was using, further enquiry always uncovers a history of increased or excessive cosmetic treatments. Usually bubble hair happens to people who are doing a lot of styling to their hair at home. And it is always, always associated with the use of heated appliances on damp hair.

~You can use a flat iron and curling irons Just make sure your hair is all the way dry. I always tell my clients if its too much effort to wake up and shower, dry your hair then style it. Simply shower at night, do your hair in the morning.

Product build-up

Hair spray accumulation

This photograph was - quite wrongly - diagnosed as head lice!

A spot weld between two hairs produced by a droplet of a modern hair spray

    In this photo you can see a perfect replica of the cuticle of the second hair, here.

This kind of replica may be seen in heavily sprayed hair which is not washed often enough

    What has happened here was that the lady concerned was washing her hair about once a week, and applying hair spray frequently and generously between shampoos. By the end of each week, significant amounts of hair spray had built up on her hair. Fortunately, modern shampoo technology is excellent at removing even a week's accumulation of hair spray, grease and dirt.

A good clarifying shampoo will help with this problem.

Matting and tangling: bird's nest hair

Tangled hair is very common. It is made worse by combing or brushing wet hair, since there is always more friction in wet hair because water raises the cuticle scales.
    'Bird's nest hair' is the vivid term used to describe hair that has all at once become a severely tangled mat. One very bad attack of this kind happened to a lady with long black hair whose religion forbade her to treat her hair cosmetically in any way. She had just used a conditioning product on it, she said, and now her hair had matted into a disastrous 'bird's nest'.
    When scientists examined the hair closely, however, they found that it showed all the signs of damage due to over-perming. Eventually the unfortunate lady admitted that she had tried to make her hair more interesting by perming it but she had had it done secretly and unprofessionally at home, so as not to flout the rules of her religion publicly.
    Bird's nest hair always happens suddenly, and there is invariably a history of chemical