Some scientists describe death of a body as the end of health. So how is it that we can describe hair as healthy or not when it’s essentially dead?
Before I tackle that question let me tell you about my man’s mistress! Her name is Roxanne and we know each other, their relationship is no secret because my husband is pretty honest about how he feels about his Roxanne and I have learned to live with` and accept it.
Every weekend Roxanne gets buffed shined up and preserved, she never gets wet and she remains covered in the garage until it is time to show her off. You see Roxanne is my husband’s most prized possession, she is a 1970 or 71, I forget, Oldsmobile Cutlass.
She is white with some thick behind w heels and a heavy, loud exhaust system that can rival any 2014 muscle car. He kept everything original, he says it looks more ‘natural’ that way, and he constantly maintains it to the point of it being borderline insulting. As a matter of fact our other vehicles will never see what the inside of that garage looks like, not until Roxanne ‘disappears’.
So what’s the point of all of that? The point is that we all do things to preserve and maintain the things we love. My husband cleans and shines his car as many of the guys in our lives do with their hobby possessions.
Your grandma has her favorite China she only pulls out to clean every Easter and we hair obsessed motivated have dead cells in the form of hair strands emerging from our scalp that we care for daily in order to preserve them.
There are a couple of things to consider when looking at this topic. The first thing is that hair though described as dead is attached to living breathing human being that is still functioning.
We eat, stay hydrated and supplement our diets to feed our body and keep our organs at ideal function. What happens on the inside of our body determines almost everything that happens on the outside, even things like thoughts, beliefs and how we feel day to day. Without getting too scientific, growth is based on a system of cell division and hair growth works precisely in that manner.
We write all the time about a variety of vitamins*, minerals and even odd single food items such as garlic and onion juice that help to stimulate or speed up hair growth. When you break it all down it comes down to the healthy stuff in the vitamins* and minerals and in our food that help us survive and helps our hair to continue growing.
Preservation and maintenance
With that said we will always maintain that you should never think a hair product ‘makes’ your hair grow, your hair is always growing if you are a relatively healthy person. Now that we have established that growth is solely dependent on what happens on the inside, what happens once your hair leaves your scalp?
Death! Yes as gruesome as that sounds, once the strand leaves our scalp you are now in preservation mode. You are now the head preserver in your own personal Smithsonian, what you know about that Smithsonian life?
When you preserve something whether living or dead you are preserving the functional health of that thing. With that said we often describe our bodies as healthy when we practice a healthy lifestyle and we consider our strands healthy when we preserve it to the point of maintaining it for years and years with minimal damage.
What we really want to drive home is that your body is built to heal itself. If you get a cut and you decide never to put anything on it to help your cut heal, you will notice your blood starting to clot and eventually a scab starting to form to protect the cut from infection. While this is all very technical, your body is simply doing what it was built to do it, to protect itself, sometimes even from…you!
Your hair is quite different, once it leaves your scalp if you do nothing to it, you will see it start to deteriorate and it will continue to do so if you continue to neglect it. It cannot mend itself so if you find yourself in a rut where you feel like neglecting your hair, just know that things will be much worse than where it started when you finally decide to pay attention.
Hair world says
lovely
Andrea MoonPearl Banks says
If it’s still attached to the root, how is it dead? BS.
Donna Lipscomb says
Pretty