With rising temperatures and barely any respite from humidity, long cold showers are nothing short of bliss. The sweat trickling down your spine, slyly crawling in between your hair strands makes a daily or a frequent hair wash an imperative. While the rest of the body is quick to dry, what do you do for your hair? Do you resort to a blow drier or dry hair with a towel?
History has it that the heat emitted from the blow drier can eventually damage your hair, making them frizzier and more difficult to manage. To top it all, our mothers and grandmothers have mostly been averse to blow driers, preferring towel-drying over everything else. But even after all the home remedies and quitting on heat styling, is your hair still damaged? Are you still facing difficulties in treating breakage and split ends? Believe it or not, you may be drying hair with a towel incorrectly.
What is Towel-Drying?
To dry hair with a towel is a way to absorb moisture from hair and reduce the time taken to air-dry later. Since the wetness in hair makes the cuticles swell and the hair stretch, it is considered a wise idea to towel dry it quickly but carefully.
If the hair is dried with a towel correctly, it can give better results than a blow drier too! Below are a few of the tips and hacks to nail that frizz-free perfect look without damaging hair:
1. Squeeze and Press
Get handsy with your hair before letting the towel touch it. Gather the strands together and gently press and squeeze out as much water as possible by hand. Start working your way from the scalp moving towards the ends. Do not twist your hair or coil them to get rid of the moisture content, for wet hair is fragile and more prone to breakage.
2. Don’t Rub, Blot
In a hurry to dry hair with a towel or to absorb the moisture completely, we often tend to rub the hair strands with the towel rigorously. This is a hair-damaging move and can lead to frizzy hair once dried. Instead of rubbing, gently blot your hair. Divide your hair into sections and gently blot it with a towel, starting from the roots.
Avoid wringing out the excess water or massaging the head to absorb the moisture.
3. Soft Towel is Your Hair’s BFF
You might be following all the steps correctly but if your towel is not soft, you will ultimately end up damaging your hair quality. The towel that is used to dry the body is usually coarse and long, making it unsuitable for your fragile, wet hair. To dry hair without damaging it, use a soft towel or a T-shirt. This will prevent your hair from getting tangled while drying.
It is most advisable to use a microfiber wrap towel because they are highly absorbent and also reduce the drying time.
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4. Wrap and Rest
Combing through wet hair is nothing short of a cardinal sin. It can cause serious breakage and cause difficulty in detangling the strands. Instead, wrapping up your hair like a turban is a vital step in the process of towel-drying. This way you can even go about your daily chores without letting your wet hair come in between. A variety of wrap towels are easily available in the market and on e-commerce stores that have a cap-like structure. You can also use a t-shirt as a wrap.
Before wrapping, it is best to make sure that your hair is flowing freely without any particular knots. To efficiently wrap all the strands, you would want to bend your head to let your hair hang downwards. Spread the towel along your neck to meet the ends of the hair. Gather the sides of the towel and gently twist and wrap all the hair strands. Once your hair is in a towel coil, push the hair at the back of your head. Unwrap after 15-20 minutes for the best results.
Make sure you do not twist your hair tightly, for this can cause serious breakage and even headache.
5. Serum, Comb, and Go
Drying hair with a towel may not completely absorb the moisture content in your hair, but it is the least damaging way to treat your tresses after a wash. Unwrap your locks after 15-20 minutes and apply a leave-in conditioner to avoid any frizz on the unruly strand. Gently comb your hair with fingers to detangle any knots before moving to a wide-toothed comb. It is best to let the strands air-dry for a natural look.
Someone rightly said men have their cars and women have their hair. Our tiny negligence or unawareness can cause damage to our luscious locks. There are also a variety of heat styling products but those can cause irreparable harm to our hair. This method of drying hair with a towel retains the original structure of the hair, thereby strengthening it. Moreover, it is a reliable technique that has been followed for ages by our mothers and grandmothers alike.
In addition to the above-listed tips, it is advisable to use cold water to wash the conditioner. Warm water is believed to be more helpful for shampoo as it separates the overlapping cells of the cuticle, whereas cold water helps seal the opened gaps to give a shinier look.
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