Are you making a DIY hair mask again?
Yeah and that's why your hair is so long, isn't it?
Hello and welcome to the Queendom. I'm Sarah Ingle and this is your
science-based guide to growing long hair. If you're struggling to find good
information out there it's because a lot of the stuff out there is just trash.
If you google "how to grow long hair"
you'll get articles from gossip magazines bloggers with no sources or
credentials or companies trying to sell you something.
Sources that I used to think were credible turns out have skewed,
misleading, or flat out wrong advice. Most of this guide comes from an 800
page hair physics and chemistry textbook. most of
it is not pleasant reading but i have spent
weeks pouring over this every day just to condense this for you
guys into the only science based long hair guide that i have ever seen so
if you're ready to bust some myths and find out what it really takes to get
your hair long let's get started.
in order to understand what can make your hair long
we need to talk a little bit about how
hair grows the four phases of hair growth are anagen
the growing phase catagen the transitioning or shrinking of the
follicle phase telogen the resting phase and oxygen of
the shedding phase the one that you want to remember is the
anagen phase that growth phase in order for your hair to be growing it
has to be in this space most people's hair on average grows
about six inches a year and can grow their hair to be around
three feet long provided that they don't cut it or damage it too much
fun fact about that is one of the studies that helped determine that was
done at disney world one myth that i want to bust right now
is that you need your hair to grow fast for it
to get long in 1988 there was a woman named Diane Witt and at the time she was
listed in the guinness book of world records for having the world's
longest hair the worcester massachusetts resident says she enjoys her hair so
much so that it's grown to be the longest in the world
measuring nearly 10 feet no plans on cutting it right now
we'll take it one step at a time even though it takes her four hours to dry
and her husband has to help her carry it around four years
later they measured it again and it was 12 feet long
even though she had the longest hair her hair did not grow any faster than
average what was unique for diane was that her
anagen phase that growth phase lasted over 20 years and she also didn't
cut it and it didn't break off one question you might wonder is was her
hair healthy probably not by your hairdresser's
standards but it was healthy enough not to break so your two
keys to very long hair are making your hair stay in that growth phase
as long as possible and keeping your hair from breaking off
that means there are trade-offs do you want perfectly healthy hair
do you want long hair do you want to style your hair a lot
let's first talk about how to make your hair stay in the growth phase
longer both hair loss when people's hair starts to thin
and length of hair are tied to the growth phase
on average for most people hair grows for two to six years
it's completely normal for your hair to shed some that is just part of the psych
love hair in adult female caucasians ages 18 to 35
the hair sheds about 100 hairs a day asian hair sheds about
70 hairs a day and african hair sheds about 60 hairs a day
if you're malnourished you're not getting all the nutrients that you need
it's going to mess up your hair growth cycle and you're going to lose hair
which is why hair gummies can kind of make the claims that they do the
vitamins that are in hair gummies typically are things that are shown if
you're deficient in them it can make you lose hair nothing about
it says it makes your hair grow any faster most people are not deficient
in the things that are in hair gummies and most of the stuff
that's in hair gummies is also in a multivitamin they're just charging
you 10 times as much and putting it in pretty packaging in my
opinion a lot of hair gummy advertising is shady because it doesn't
really do what they're implying that it does i even highlighted something in my
chemistry and physics of hair textbook that says no vitamins have been proven
to make hair grow faster or longer there are a lot of
things about the hair growth cycle that we still don't understand but we do
know that it has a lot to do with hormones
hormones are so intertwined with your hair growth cycle that pregnant women's
hair tend to stay in the growth phase longer and i think that's also why
a lot of people have this idea that prenatal vitamins
make hair grow and it's not actually the prenatal vitamins it's
the fact that the hormones that happen during pregnancy make people's hair stay
in the growth phase longer the shedding rate also typically goes
way up after they have their baby their hair tends to shed like crazy
shedding rate also increases with age especially with men
there's even a little bit of variation with the time of year an easy way to
remember that is there's more hair fall in the fall so how do you get your hair
to stay in that growth phase longer there are chemicals that we
know make the hair growth phase last longer
you usually find those in products like rogaine that are meant to stop hair loss
the second you stop it the product stops working if you have thinning hair and
you stop using it all of that hair is going to fall out and there's also a
lot of good evidence to support laser led therapy they make little
helmets that you can wear usually laser led therapy is meant to
help people with hair loss but technically
if it is helping your hair stay in that growth phase longer it could potentially
when you're dealing with really long lengths of hair make your hair
grow longer than it would otherwise for most people it is not the length of your
growth phase that is sabotaging your long hair journey it's
your hair is breaking off in order to understand how to keep your
hair from breaking off we have to talk a little bit
about the structure of your hair you're going to want to understand
the cuticle the cuticle are like clear scales on the outside of your hair
that protect everything on the inside of the hair shaft like shingles on a house
they're overlapping the cuticle is your protection barrier
and the cuticle differs dramatically between different races and hair
types asian hair typically has the most layers of scales
caucasian hair has fewer layers and african hair typically has the fewest
layers of cuticle scales more layers means more protection and
the more you open the cuticle the more you wear down your protection
so you want to avoid products with high ph levels like bleach and even many
shampoos because they lift open the cuticle
scales leaving the hair extra vulnerable to damage
another piece of the puzzle is the cross section shape so if you think of your
hair as a big long noodle and you chop it and
you look at the this circley part that's a cross section
asian hair tends to be the most perfectly round in a cross section
then caucasian is still pretty round but it's a little bit more elliptical
and african hair tends to be the most elliptical because
asian hair has the most layers of cuticle and it is the most
perfectly round hair shaft it tends to be more resistant to damage on multiple
levels on from pulling twisting even chemicals and it also makes it
harder to bleach african hair is on the opposite extreme
it has fewer layers of cuticle and because the elliptical shape and the
curl pattern the cuticle scales don't fit together as uniformly
so the hair is much more susceptible to breakage
so if you want to know how strong your hair is
there's a term called tensile strength and it's basically
how strong is something when you pull on it and isn't gonna break
so they have machines that basically can pull on hair and see how many times it
can pull before the hair snaps with caucasian
hair it's about 35 000 times african hairs about 5500 times and for
african relaxed hair it is only 550 times before the hair
snaps until recently a lot of the major brands
did not have products that properly address the needs
of african hair there is so much to say on this topic
but i think that it warrants its entire own
video all of the studies that i've seen have broken down
hair into asian caucasian and african i don't know why those are
the only three that tend to be tested you know your hair best you can probably
figure out which of those three categories your hair is closest to if
you don't feel like you fit into one of those groups
but one of the main things i wanted to take away from this is that different
types of hair have different needs try not to compare
your hair to other people's hair and i would highly recommend that you
get hair advice from somebody who understands that your
hair has different needs than somebody else's hair
otherwise they could have been giving you great advice that works for them
that might not work for you and that's one of the dangers of youtube
is unless someone is very clearly citing your sources and you're
checking that they're actually uh understand how to read
and interpret those sources people could potentially give you bad advice
so depending on what type of hair you have you understand that it can be
more or less susceptible to damage so we're gonna try and hone in on some
things that can help you reduce damage to your hair the main
thing that is breaking your hair is actually you when you're brushing it
some of the treatments or heat styling we do
does make it more fragile and damages the cuticle but the actual
breaking usually happens with brushing and combing
so when you're combing your brushing your hair and if you come to a tangle
go below that tangle and keep brushing your way up until you work out the
tangle that way it's going to cause so much
less breakage yanking and here's one i'd never heard
of before you are more likely to get split ends
with a blunt haircut versus a tapered haircut there's a term
called end peak force which is basically just how much force is pulling on your
hair when you're brushing it end peak force is four times higher for
blunt haircuts than for tapered haircuts and because of that the number of split
ends increase three times when you're combing your
hair if you have a blunt haircut versus a tapered haircut combs and
brushes with more space between the teeth or bristles lead
to fewer and less complex tangles and it lowers that combing force so it
causes less abrasion and fewer broken hairs i have learned so much
about different types of ways that the hair
breaks different types of split ends whether wet or dry or comb or brush is
better so i really think we're going gonna need an
entirely separate video just on split ends and hair breakage but
for now i'm just gonna just give you more tips that you can use to keep your
hair from breaking a lot of people really curly hair will always say oh my
goodness i'm not gonna brush my hair because it poops out and it's just a
mess not only does it often poof out your hair if you have highly
coiled hair combing it wet actually breaks the hair
less than combing it dry but the opposite is true if you have wavy
to straight hair if you have way too straight hair you're more likely to get
breakage when your hair is wet which is so important if you have curly hair
highly coiled hair go to someone who specializes that and understands that
everyone whether you have curly hair straight hair
wavy hair all of the above or anything in between
you need to be using conditioner or detangler when combing and brushing
i think that's something we all already knew but here's what
really convinced me so for virgin hair usually
it has a lifespan of 55.2 million brush strokes which is a lot
that exact same hair after conditioning it
you're brushing but that doesn't mean to avoid brushing or combing all
together most of that brushing or combing breakage that happens
is because the hairs are tangled so it's a little bit of a balance here
you need to brush it enough that you're not letting the hair get too tangled in
the first place but then also just be careful when you are brushing it because
that is when the overwhelming majority of breakage happens
in addition to these a quick list of things that you can do to avoid breaking
your hair you're probably familiar with a lot of these already
but these are all ones backed by science first of all don't bleach your hair this
is obviously what i don't follow if you really really want long hair
don't bleach it and because i do bleach my hair i have
to be extra careful with a lot of these other ones to avoid breaking it
avoid heat styling make sure you're using uv protection
putting your hair into some sort of loose braid or protective style before
bed and a silk bonnet and or pillow case also when you do have those protective
hair styles i recommend switching up either where you secure your hair or
switching up the actual hairstyle so that you're not constantly pulling on
your hair in the exact same place do not use high ph hair products
also don't wash your hair every day not only is the water breaking bonds in your
hair the actual scrubbing of the hair does do
a lot of damage to it even at the top of your head you are
roughing up that cuticle and causing little bits of damage over time use
conditioner if you're using shampoo personally i don't use shampoo anymore
i use a product called nu wash i've talked about it a lot in other videos so
i'll link to some of those in the description but if you are using a
shampoo make sure it's one with a low ph make
sure you use a shower filter especially if you live in an area with very hard
water make sure you're securing your hair
before exercising or before being in the wind silk or satin
hair elastic avoid pool water chlorine is very bad
for your hair be careful with blow drying even with
cool air it's a great place for people to wind up with tangles
and if you're blow drying with a brush you also definitely need to be careful
because brushing is where breaks happen if you
want long healthy hair do not tease your hair when i saw under
a microscope what happens when you tease your hair it
straight up breaks off huge sections of your cuticle one to watch
out for if you have very coily hair twisting is extra bad you're way more
likely to get breakage definitely avoid chemical straighteners and relaxing that
is horrible for the health of your hair even if it looks pretty
and doesn't look frizzy that doesn't necessarily mean that it's
healthy as we showed in that graph a while back relaxing your hair really
compromises the strength of your hair if you really want to go off a deep end
if you can sleep so you're not moving your hair so much
and rubbing your hairs against each other
technically that will help but it's very difficult to control what you're doing
during your sleep this one i know is gonna be controversial but
avoid diy hair treatments unless you really really know what
you're doing at least measure the ph and make sure that it's
in like a decent range and even still most of
the ingredients on your fridge are not processed into
small enough little bits to actually get into your hair and do any good
i think a lot of the diy treatments are either a waste of time and you're just
making your hair goopy and in some cases potentially damaging to it especially if
it involves baking soda
i want to touch on shampoo a little bit more because it's the one thing where i
don't really trust a lot of
what the beauty industry is throwing at us especially after reading this
textbook they will flat out say that shampoo
tends to be very damaging especially ones that have a very high ph
when companies do research usually the number one thing that is prioritized
is customer satisfaction which sounds good they want us to like what we're
buying weird sprays gets tricky the number one
thing that they've tested makes us feel like our hair is being cleaned and
determines customer satisfaction is lathering how much does it suds up
how much does it lather when we're shampooing our hair it
makes us feel like we're getting our hair cleaner
and the more it lathers the higher the customer satisfaction
score is however the lathering has nothing to do
with cleaning your hair there was a sentence i highlighted in
the textbook that says for pragmatic financial reasons
insufficient blind tests are generally conducted to determine discernibility
because the bottom line is sales not objective understanding it's tricky
if a company makes something and customers try it out and they're like oh
i don't like this and they really believe that it's not getting their hair
cleaned but it actually is they're not going to
sell any of it and they'll literally have people like yelling at them on
twitter or on their instagram feed be like this
stuff doesn't work even if it does i'm just very curious to
see the more that this information gets out to people
if we start to see more companies doing what customers know
might theoretically be better for their hair even if it doesn't feel as good
all that being said long hair isn't everything it is not practical or even
emotionally healthy to try and live in such a way that your hair isn't
touched you do not have to do everything on that list
i want you to be informed so you can make the best decisions for you
please try not to compare your hair to other people's
we all have different genetic makeup you just work
on your own hair journey and we can all be on a journey together
whatever our goal is and not comparing our hair to one another and you know
what if you want long hair but you still want
to style it a lot or do all these things to it
extensions are always an option for people too this is just to inform you so
that you can make the best decisions for you
not anybody else you when we started last year on this journey to find the
best and worst hair advice i had no idea i was gonna be diving this much into
chemistry physics and like learning so much about
hair even just throughout this video future
videos that i know that i want to make and dive more into things
split ends and breakage race and hair hair loss and hair thinning and also
just where to get good beauty info so if you want to see those
remember to subscribe and ring the little bell so you don't
miss those also i want you guys to tell me
in the comments below if your hair could be any length -- you didn't have to work
harder or have to worry about breaking -- any length
how long would you want your hair to be?
Shout out today to Megan Wescombe
I'm so glad that you find my videos helpful
anyway this is your ultimate guide on how to grow long hair i hope you geeked
out on it as much as i did and i will see you next time.
how's my hair look? I dunno.
I can't see my head. I can't see my head.
there's some of my head. there's my mouth. mamamamamam