This is the missing step in your flat iron routine

While some may spend their time wishing wholeheartedly for naturally curly hair, others envy the blessing of having naturally straight and manageable hair. Not only is it time consuming to flat iron your hair every day, but it can also be damaging to use heat styling tools on a regular basis. Regular exposure to a flat iron can burn the hair, leaving it frizzy, dry, and hard to manage. Fortunately, there are a lot of ways you can prevent heat damage if you do use a heat styling tool on a regular basis. Follow our simple steps below to make sure that your hair is protected from irreversible heat damage that can leave your hair dry and frizzy.

To better understand how you can protect your hair, you should first understand what your hair is and what it means to be healthy. Although you can’t feel your hair, it’s very much alive and desperate for nutrition in the same way that the rest of your body is. Each strand of healthy hair has a couple of layers to it. The outer layer protects the inner core (also called the medulla), which is filled with water and air and creates the translucent glow you see in healthy hair. Heat tools will damage and burn the outer layer of the hair strand, causing the inner layers to become dry and lifeless.  

Once the outer layer of the hair is burned, there’s really no way to save it. Your hair exists as it is once it comes out of your scalp, so once it becomes damaged the only way to fix it is to cut off the damaged parts and start fresh. Heat tools most often damage the ends first—or at least appear that way—because they’ve had the most exposure over time. It’s always a good idea to get a regular trim to keep split ends from creeping up the hair shaft and causing irreversible damage in places you don’t want them to. However, there are ways you can avoid having to deal with split ends as often.

Using heat tools can contribute to unwanted hair damage because heat—as you already know—burns out any moisture it comes in contact with. Those tiny puffs of steam leaving your hair as you straighten it—as satisfying as it may be—is your hair’s lifeblood quite literally burning away. The right products and tools will prevent that from happening, you just have to know where to start.    

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