Hair questions, answered without a booking attached

Yes, and it is one of the most under-estimated causes of damage seen here. Sustained sun exposure dries the hair out, lifts colour and roughens the cuticle over weeks rather than in one afternoon, and the wind on a daily ride adds mechanical damage on top of it — hair whipping against itself and against a bag strap is what produces the frayed, broken pieces along the outer length that guests read as hair fall. It is why two people with the same hair and the same routine can arrive in very different condition. The answer is not a treatment: it is covering the hair for the ride, keeping the ends trimmed so the fraying does not travel, and not booking a chemical service on hair that is already being worn down by something that has not stopped.

Oil is for the scalp and for conditioning the length before a wash — it softens, it reduces friction while combing, and a scalp massage with it is genuinely worth doing. What it does not do is repair. It cannot mend a split, it cannot rebuild protein that has been lost, and it cannot put elasticity back into hair that no longer springs back when it is stretched wet. Leaving heavy oil on for days does not increase the benefit either; it builds up, and build-up quietly stops treatments working because nothing penetrates a coated cuticle. Where oiling is treated as the cure for damage, the damage keeps progressing underneath something that feels like it is helping.

Chlorine strips the cuticle and it strips a treated cuticle faster — a smoothing or repair result that would have held for months can be spent in weeks by regular swimming. Sea water does the same by a different route. Neither means you should stop swimming; it means the hair needs rinsing thoroughly with plain water immediately afterwards rather than at the end of the day, and it means telling us you swim before a treatment is chosen, because it changes both which formulation is opened and what you are told about how long the result will last. Hair that is going into a pool three times a week is planned for differently from hair that is not.

By what a wet strand does, not by how the hair looks. Stretch one gently between the fingers: hair that stretches and does not spring back has lost protein, and that is what a protein mask or a bond builder is for. Hair that feels rough, dry and brittle but still springs back has lost moisture, and protein on it will make it feel worse rather than better. Getting this the wrong way round is the commonest home-care error, and the direction it usually fails in is protein overload — expensive keratin-repair masks used daily leave hair more brittle than it started, because more protein is not more strength. If you cannot tell, that is a fair reason to have it read rather than guessed: the test takes seconds and it decides which of the two your routine should be built on.

No, and being in a hurry is the situation it exists for. One wet strand is stretched before any treatment is chosen, on every head, without exception — it takes seconds and it changes the answer more often than anything else in the reading. Where the chemical history is complicated or henna is anywhere in it, a full strand is processed exactly as the service would be and read before the rest of the hair is committed. The same holds for the temperature the iron will be run at, which is decided for your head rather than carried over from the last guest. These are the two checks an inexperienced stylist skips when the day is busy, and skipping them is how a crown gets burnt on hair that was fine an hour earlier. If there is not time for the test, there is not time for the treatment.

It counts completely, and this is the single most common gap in a chemical history — not because guests hide it, but because the hair looks like one solid shade now and it genuinely feels like old news. A global lift or highlights from a year ago with a dark colour over them since still leave weak hair underneath the shade, and it is that hair, not the colour sitting on top of it, that has to survive whatever is done next. It is why the history is asked as a history rather than as a list of recent appointments, why home box colour counts, and why a treatment done years ago on length you still have is relevant. Where the account and the hair disagree, the hair is believed: a wet strand that turns soft and gummy is bleach, whatever the record says.