Ahhh, the internet. This ubiquitous piece of technology has managed to spread information unlike anything in human history, allowing for people to spread all sorts of trends and unique knowledge across the world. In the realm of hair care, this is no exception, with the internet providing a place for hair enthusiasts far and wide to learn everything from new styling techniques to different ways in which to best care for their specific hair type. While this can certainly be a great blessing and something to be thankful for, as with many things relating to the internet, there are some downsides as well. Although much of the information shared on the internet is helpful and enlightening, there’s a great deal of misleading and potentially dangerous information out there to be avoided.
To sort the good info from the bad, be careful about which hot trend you choose to follow. Read below for a list of five hair care trends to be avoided at all costs!
100 Brushes Each Day
This is a trend that extends beyond the days of the internet, dating back several centuries as a beloved method for many generations of women. As the line of thinking goes, brushing one’s hair helps to provide multiple benefits, such as dispersing natural oils to increase moisturization and boosting hair strength to straightening the hair and correcting any textural issues. For whatever reason, the magical number of one hundred brushes has been deemed the perfect amount of brushes to keep one’s hair in tip top shape and create the shiny, silky-smooth hair of your dreams!
The reality is that there is no specific amount of brush strokes that will make one’s hair stronger and healthier, although hair brushing does help to keep hair well maintained and untangled. When you brush your hair too much, however, you run the risk of snagging your hair and causing breakage, along with progressively weakening the hair strand and destroying the outer cuticle layer. While such excessive brushing might make your hair look straighter and remove any fallen hairs in the meantime, in the long-run this can completely ruin your hair’s health and structure.
DIY Haircuts
After a year of quarantining in home, many of us were forced to become our own hair stylist and trim our hair. Although the internet has provided a fantastic resource for people to learn how to trim their hair at an acceptable rate while waiting for his or her hairstylist to return, the reality is that it is never a good idea for an untrained person to cut his or her own hair. Sadly, with the rise of Tik Tok and Instagram trends, many DIY haircuts took off, such as the ponytail shag, the ponytail crop, and diy curtain bangs. These haircut trends all follow the same line of thinking, in which you twist or fold your hair in a particular way and then cut it in one motion, making for an effortlessly beautiful haircut! The reality is far less enjoyable, as many of these results end up looking sloppy and misshapen, a far cry from the results gained from a trained, professional hair stylist.
Brazilian Blowouts
This trend is actually an outlier on this list, as it is the only one that is performed in a professional setting by a trained professional. A Brazilian blowout involves utilizing heat to seal a liquid keratin product into one’s hair strand to perfectly seal the cuticle and boost the overall hair structure. The result is incredibly smooth, shiny hair that is as soft and manageable as possible that looks and feels like a dream. Sounds perfect, right? However, the process behind these procedures is far less glamorous.
Brazilian blowouts rely on a combination of strong chemicals that dramatically alter the hair structure, and these chemicals can be incredibly harsh on the health of your hair and scalp. Even worse, however, are the more extreme ingredients used in some treatments, such as formaldehyde, which have been linked to numerous diseases including cancer. As if that weren’t bad enough, these procedures are oftentimes very expensive, with temporary results that require multiple, repeated treatments to preserve the effects. We say that you should skip the Brazilian blowout and focus on your long-term hair health and styling techniques to get similar, runway-worthy results.
Rainbow Hair Dying
Hair coloring has come a long way over the years. Initial color treatments utilized harsh, destructive chemicals that ruined the health of people’s hair while causing terrible side effects to the scalp. Thankfully, today’s hair coloring treatments are far more gentle, and can accommodate a wide variety of colors to suit just about everyone’s fancy. These recent advancements in hair coloring have led to some rather incredible hair styles with all sorts of hair colors being worked together to create a beautiful result. However, this coloring can run the risk of being a bit too much, as with the recent “Rainbow Hair Coloring” trend. As the name suggests, this trend involves dying your hair in every color of the rainbow, creating a kaleidoscope of a hair color. As pretty and unique as this style looks, the simple truth is that this sort of extreme hair coloring treatment is incredibly harsh on one’s hair. Hair coloring is a delicate process that involves carefully matching the new tones of the desired dye with one’s natural hair color, and a rainbow hair color job is incredibly harsh, as it involves a great amount of bleach in order to properly lift one’s hair color. If you couldn’t tell by now, our verdict is that the rainbow hair style is a big no-no!
Hair Relaxers
If you have incredibly tight, coily hair, you may be tempted to wonder what life would be like with straighter, less textured hair. Although a variety of styling techniques and hair care products can help to tame textured hair and make it easier to style, nothing is as impactful as a hair relaxer product. These hair relaxers work by applying strong chemicals to alter the hair bond and cause the hair to straighten instead of revert to its curly, textured pattern. While they are incredibly effective, the chemicals utilized in these treatments are incredibly harsh, and carry the risk of chemical burns on the scalp if applied to closely to the root. Chemicals such as lye and formaldehyde are used in these products, making them a big no-no for any hair type.
