hair care

Hair Styling Essentials

I have a weird relationship with my hair, if I'm being honest.

I love my colour, green really is just so 'me', and I love having a vibrant shade. I really don't feel like myself if I have my hair brown, even though that's my natural colour. I love how shiny and soft my hair feels, and I'm grateful for that.

However, I really don't like how much I damage the ends of my hair due to constant colouring, straightening, and basically not being very nice to it. I also don't like my natural waves. They're the frizzy, barely there kind of mess that nobody wants. Nowhere near straight and sleek, but definitely not a pretty wave/curl. I've always spent so much time straightening it and damaging it further, just to 'calm it down' a little. So I knew I needed a bit of a fix.

I was kindly sent the amazing H2D Magicurl X3 styling wand* recently, and I thought I might as well give it a little try. Oh, you should know right now that I have tried for YEARS to wave/curl my hair with straighteners and I just can't do it! Seriously, I'm crap. It just doesn't work for me. So I can never really have my hair anything but boringly straight.

If you've stuck around here with me for more than a month or two then you'll know I'm not usually a raven haired goth, but rather a colourful peacock keen to show off all it's colours. In 2015 alone, I've had pink hair, brown hair, blue hair, purple hair, green hair and now black. It's fair to say I like change. However with this decision to be changing how I look so drastically, every few months; it means my hair can take some pretty swift damage. It's the reason why I keep my hair shoulder length and get it cut often, I trim off the damage I do so there's no evidence around. Mwhahaha. I also have a hefty supply of hair extensions in every colour so I can even change the length of my hair on demand.

Having green hair ain't easy guys. It's all high maintenance, dead/dry ends and plenty of damage being done unfortunately. Of course there are a whole range of products out there that are aimed at tackling these problems, and I do have some favourites (I'll get to that), but I'm starting to think the greatest friend to my locks is self employment! Allow me to explain...
At the start if this year I did share some of my hair care/dying tips for colourful hair; and these still stand true if you'd like to check this out. However the greatest problem I always had was heat. Now we all know to avoid heat like the plague if you want your hair to stay healthy; but it was so hard for me! I have thick, wavy hair (sounds lovely doesn't it? It's not) which takes ages to dry. So when I used to work full time, I had to come home and shower, and blow dry my hair - no allowing it to dry on its own; I'd be there for days. I'd use the cooler settings, but it's still heat and not great for already damaged hair of course. To top things off, 99% of the time my hair looks like crap if left in its natural state. It's frizzy, big, puffy and not at all sleek or even bouncy. The best and easiest way to fix this has always been straighteners. I adore my GHD's and will never ever give them up; you'll have to pry them out of my cold dead hands I swear. But I felt I had to straighten my hair every single day for work, to look half decent at least, and this amount of heat was unbearable. I'm already attacking my hair with bleach/green dye each month, so this on top was practically a crime.
Things are SO different now though, it's hilarious. Working from home means I'm not leaving the house every single morning, and I don't have to worry about my hair to be honest. I'm not saying I always look a mess (okay maybe sometimes though), but it's certainly much less pressure to look all made up. These days it's much rarer that I blow dry my hair, and if I do it's on the coolest setting possible, and I only half dry it; allowing the rest to finish naturally. I wear hats almost everyday now with the excuse of colder weather, and straightening my hair might happen once a week at most. I cannot tell you the improvements I've been seeing already in the past six weeks; I'm so happy! I've felt I've been so much kinder to my poor green hair, and it's thanking me for it.
Now for my favourite products, as promised. I won't make a list as long as my arm; I simply have two recommendations for you guys. In fact, I've photographed them both at the top of this post. We have Lee Stafford Hair Growth Conditioner and Milkshake Incredible Milk Leave In Conditioner. Both of these products are now my favourite thing EVER, and will continue to be added to my basket on a regular basis. The whole Lee Stafford range is amazing, but I especially love the conditioner. Aimed at encouraging hair growth (yay!), it leaves my hair feeling super soft and healthy after each use I'm happy to say. Then there's the Milkshake leave in conditioner - DEVINE. Buy this now, just go, NOW. Let me start by saying it smells like heaven in a bottle, I simply cannot stop sniffing this stuff when I apply it. But best of all, a few sprays of this on my locks, and I'm left with hair that feels stronger and shinier than I've ever seen it before. I honestly can't rave about this product enough!

So there we have it; work from home, avoid heat, buy those two products and your hair will love you! Let's just hope mine grows much faster now that I'm being really nice to it eh?

post signature