When it comes to hair washing, my routine is pretty straightforward: Get into the shower , wet my entire head, apply shampoo all over, and rinse. Then, apply a conditioner or hair mask . The end.
A quick enough way to get the job done, I assumed I was doing it right. You can imagine my horror when I discovered that I’d actually been washing my hair all wrong – and to make matters worse, I’d been using the wrong shampoo too. This revelation arrived courtesy of Lena de Pons , a pharmacist based in Spain who just so happens to be an expert on the science of skin, hair and scalp care.
She advocates for the importance of knowing how – and most importantly, with what – to wash our hair. And, she swears that the secret to getting what she calls “ a hair glow ” is actually all about the type of shampoo we’re using and not much more. Her main mane recommendation? Use a shampoo with an acidic pH in order to seal the cuticle and help reflect light.
If a shampoo with an “acidic pH” sounds like it would fry your hair, it might be helpful to first get a baseline understanding of the structure of your hair. “The hair cuticle is made up mainly of keratin; it is the outermost layer of the hair, and therefore the one that protects the internal structures of the hair – the cortex and the medulla – from physical and chemical damage,” de Pons explains. “If we look at the cuticle under a microscope, we will see that it is made up of a set of flat cells that, due to th.