Knowing how to take care of bleached hair is absolutely essential if you want a good result after bleaching. Too many people google some basics and skip all the fine details, thus ending up with absolutely ruined hair after bleaching. It’s not uncommon for many to even be led down by their hair stylists with bad advice and incomplete guidelines. And considering what bleaching does to your hair, all that can be truly disappointing.
So, if you’ve come here to find out what to do before bleaching hair and what to do after bleaching hair, we’ll try to go over every single detail, tip, and suggestion to ensure that you are 100% prepare for the whole multiple-week-long process of preparing, bleaching, and rejuvenating your hair.
What to do to prepare your hair for bleaching?
You may have heard some random tips and tricks such as using coconut oil before bleaching hair or not washing your hair before bleaching but there are a lot of other things you can and should do as well. Given how hard bleach is on our hair, being as prepared as possible is absolutely vital. Minimizing chemicals and heat, maximizing moisture and nourishment are the obvious basics but let’s go over every single step one by one.
- Find a good hairstylist to talk to before you even start preparing for anything. We accent on “good” because an incompetent consultant can miss a lot of fine details as well as give you bad advice. And we’d also stress that a one-on-one consultation is important because everyone’s hair is different and requires individualized care.
- Give your hair enough time to heal from any problem, ailment or treatment it might have gone through in recent weeks. Especially if you’ve bleached recently and you want to bleach again – definitely give enough time for your hair to get better first.
- Stop using any hot rollers, curling irons, blow driers or any other heating tools in the weeks before bleaching. All heat treatments can be tiring and damaging to your hair which is not what you want before bleaching.
- Don’t wash your hair for 2-3 days before bleaching. Don’t worry about your hair is a bit dirty – bleach won’t care. As for being a bit oily – that’s actually a benefit so don’t worry about it either
- Use oils such as coconut oil, argan oils, avocado, and others. Warm them up, apply them and leave them on without washing them off. Sleep with a cap or a towel on your pillow if you have to but such oils will nourish and strengthen your hair in a great way which is very important before bleaching.
- Use a mask 1-2 times per week for ~30 minutes. A mixture of olive oil, coconut oil, yogurt, honey, bananas, avocado, and an egg can supply your hair and roots with a lot of protein, oils, and moisture to give it the strength the withstand a bleaching procedure.
- Make sure that you’re using high-quality, professional-grade bleaching products. Using something cheap and off-brand is the quickest and easiest way to ruin your hair permanently. If you’re short on cash just postpone the procedure until you’re financially stable enough to afford quality products. The prep for bleaching takes weeks anyway so you’ll have time.
What to do to rejuvenate and repair your hair after bleaching?
Now that you’ve prepared for bleaching well enough and that you’ve got the procedure over with, it’s time to take care of your quite exhausted, malnourished, and damaged hair. Even an adequately done bleaching with high-quality products is typically very damaging and stressful to the hair so you’ll need to take really good care of it. Here are some tips for what to do after bleaching:
- Don’t use a shampoo for the first 48 hours after the procedure. Your hair needs the oils it produces to repair the damage done by the bleaching – don’t wash said oils off with a shampoo.
- Apply daily 5-minute oil treatments to help rejuvenate your hair. Your hair will need all the help it can get so hair oil or cream masks can go a long way of doing just that. Things such as coconut oil, avocado, olive oil, and other nourishing oils can do wonders for your hair even just for 5 minutes per day.
- Commercial protein masks can also be very helpful for daily care and nourishment. Using both a commercial mask and a DIY home mask is generally unnecessary so just pick one of the two options and go for it.
- Use a good leave-in conditioner daily to further moisturize your hair. Your hair will be severely dehydrated after the bleaching so a good conditioner can help a lot with moisturizing it.
- Don’t scratch, pull, or tear your hair under any circumstances. Your hair will be extra vulnerable after bleaching so you should be very gentle with it.
- Trim the split ends on your hairs. Getting a little trim from your hairstylist can be a good idea as the split ends of your hair can easily grow into fully broken hairs very quickly. You can do that yourself as well if you just have a pair of nice hair scissors and a second hand-held mirror.
- Take Omega-3 fish oil and vitamins for several months after the procedure to help nourish your hair.
- Avoid too much sun exposure and any heat treatments –even a simply dry blower can be devastating to a recently bleached hair.
- Don’t tie your hair in stressful and complicated styles – just let it hang.
