What to do about hair breakage and split ends

No matter how stylish you are, split ends aren’t an easy look to pull off. Here’s a quick guide to what causes split ends and hair breakage, how to prevent this, and how to get rid of split ends when they sneak past your defenses.

What causes split ends and hair breakage?

Split ends, hair breakage and so on are usually symptoms of dryness and damage. Dryness makes your hair brittle, and brittle hairs are easily broken. Some of the most common causes are:

General dryness. If your hair tends to be dry, pay careful attention to moisturizing.

Bleaching. If you really want to avoid hair damage, it's best to avoid bleaching at all, but you may decide that having your preferred hair color is worth the risk.

Excessive dyeing. If possible, try not to dye your hair more than six to eight weeks. The longer you can bear to wait between dyes, the better. Dyeing your hair light colors tends to be more damaging than using darker shades.

Over-washing. If you’re washing your hair every day, see if cutting back to every other or every third day reduces your dryness problem.

What causes split ends and hair breakage?

Vigorous or excessive brushing. To limit damage, avoid brushing your hair while it’s wet. Brush as much as you feel you need to; don’t give yourself an arbitrary number of strokes you have to meet, or you could end up overbrushing.
Tight hairstyles. Give your hair a little room to breathe if you can.
Frequent, unprotected exposure to heat. Apply heat protectant to your hair before using heat styling tools, and try to pick tools with technology designed to limit heat damage, such as ThermoProtect blow-drying technology or SplitStop straighteners.

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How to get rid of split ends

If your hair’s a little dry, you may be able to avoid hair breakage by following the advice above.

You can’t unsplit an end, though. If your hair’s already splitting, the only real method for how to get rid of split ends is to trim it. You don’t necessarily need to cut it much shorter; you can just trim away a centimeter or two.

If you want to avoid losing any length at all, you can try trimming individual split ends, hair by hair, while leaving the rest of the strands untouched. This is time-consuming, though, and the untouched ends are also likely to be on the verge of splitting if you’re having split end issues, so it’s usually simpler to get an all-over trim.

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