So this is the last day of week-one of healthy hair! I can’t believe how much I’ve learned about my own hair. This last characteristic of hair that I’d like to talk about is elasticity. It’s pretty self-explanatory, elasticity is how well our hair stretches. In this case, while it’s wet. It’s important to know how well your hair stretches so that you can take necessary precautions to keep it from breaking. You can test how well your hair stretches by taking a strand of damp hair and pulling each side gently to see if it seems to stretch or break. It will eventually break if you keep pulling, but the key here is to notice the stretch it has before breaking. Hair is amazing in that, when wet, it can stretch about 50 percent more it’s length before returning back to it’s normal length. If it stretches, notice if it returns back to it’s original length. If it doesn’t you may have low elasticity hair. If it returns to normal length then you have normal elasticity.

So what do you do with this knowledge?

Well, if you have low elasticity hair it most likely means that your hair is a little on the dry side. Conditioning treatments such as hair masks once a week should help keep your hair moisturized so that it can stretch without breaking. Be careful while handling your hair when it’s wet too. Try not to tie it up immediately after getting out of the shower. Wet hair is prone to breakage because that is when it is most weak and breakage usually happens wherever a hair tie is.

This week has flown by and I have learned that I have wavy, fine hair that is also low density and not very porous, and from today’s elasticity test, I have normal elasticity. So with this knowledge I am going to make sure I am a little more careful when handling my  hair when wet, not using high heat while blow drying, and will start incorporating a hair mask every week. I am also using a coconut oil product to the ends of my hair after washing.

I hope that this week has helped you figure out something new about your hair that you maybe didn’t know before. Next week starts to get a little more practical as I will go over proper haircare and we will start to build a personalized haircare routine. Looking forward to it!

What did you learn about your hair and what will you start doing differently?

Here is a video of a recap of this weeks posts!