How to Treat Your Hair Right

by Ruth Crilly | Nov 5, 2012

Here’s a brief rundown on how I look after my highlighted, oft-blowdried hair. I’d like to point out that it’s not “oft blowdried” out of choice – every time I go on a modeling shoot it just gets tonged and backcombed to within an inch of its life! I can almost hear it screaming every time a heated appliance comes near it. Due to this frequently suffered Barnet Torture I have a few hard rules when it comes to my hair maintenance and they are as follows:

1) Don’t highlight it the whole way through, just through the top and front sections. I keep my natural colour through more than 50% of my hair – it keeps the condition better and it gives a bit of “depth” when my hair moves. My hair angel is the one and only John Spanton from Trevor Sorbie in Covent Garden. He just gets my colour spot-on every single time. Last week I asked him to “take it down a bit for the autumn” and he just knew exactly what I was talking about. Glorious man that he is.

2) Don’t wash it every day. OK, I’ll admit that some people may have to, but I often think that people just get into the habit of washing daily and then feel dirty if they don’t. I’m not entirely convinced that most people need to wash it daily… Give it a try – leave it a day and see how it feels. Can you get away with dry shampoo? Slicking it back? It’s not so much the washing that I don’t like, it’s the consequent hair-drying. If you can halve the number of blowdries you have in a lifetime, then that’s a wonderful thing in my books!

3) Avoid harsh, stripping shampoos. You know in the gym when you have the wall dispenser of free shampoo and it makes your skin turn inside out with dryness? Yeah, avoid that. And anything that is coloured bright green and smells amazingly of apples, or costs £1 for eight bottles in poundland. Chances are that you’re buying glorified washing-up liquid that will literally make your hair start to cry. I’ve talked about my favourites in the video below – they could be a nice place to start if you’re looking for gentle, effective shampoos.

4) Condition, condition, condition! Highlighted, chemically-treated or coarse hair needs to be deep-conditioned a couple of times a week. It makes so much difference to manageability and shine – your run-of-the-mill quick conditioner stays on the hair for what? Twenty seconds before you rinse it off? You can’t expect that to do more than detangle. I love some of these pre-shampoo treatments that have started popping up more frequently – again, see the video below.

5) Ask yourself: do you really need to straighten it today? Because if you don’t, put those flat-irons away! Have a little experiment with a natural, wavy style or a sleek ponytail or something completely new. If it’s the weekend, give your hair a break – the people in the Tesco’s queue won’t appreciate your poker-straight locks as much as your hair will appreciate a little holiday from being slow-fried inside two metal plates.

Feel free to ignore all of the above, they are just the rules that I myself follow. If you want to hear me chatting away about them, with a few extra tips thrown in for good measure, then click the play button on the video below! If you can’t see the video below then click HERE, and if you can’t be bothered to watch the video at all then scroll down to have a look at my hair product arsenal.