Apparently like your semi natural food in a can, your hair can have a shelf life. There is a notion that says because hair has a shelf life then it would make sense to trim your hair on a set schedule, like every three months or every six months depending on what your stylist recommends.
The thing is how do you figure out what your hair’s shelf life really is? Human hair weaves do not have a shelf life until they are installed on a person’s head, then the manufacturer gives it a year with regular use, other than that an unused hair weave can stay on the shelf for years.
Let get back to basics shall we
A hair strand has a specific scientific structure, and outer layer known as the cuticle, the middle layer known as the cortex and the inner most layer known as the medulla. The cuticle layer can respond to things, like cold water, heat, or a chemical by opening and closing or degenerating depending on what we do to the strand.
That is as far as it goes in terms of what the strand can do, no matter how you look at it, the strand reacts it never regenerates of behaves on its own, like other biological processes in our bodies.
For us visual people let me put it to you like this, right now I have mini twists in my hair and if for any reason I decide to release one and instead of patiently unraveling it, I just rip it apart then I will cause physical damage to a couple of my strands causing them to look fried, frizzy and damaged.
That damage will remain there until I either patch it up with protein which would probably not work, or I trim off the damage areas. Your hair can be patched, by adding things that stick to the strand, like protein but it cannot heal itself, so what does all this mean?
This means that your hair will remain intact as long as you do nothing to cause it damage, so the shelf life is pretty much endless. If you wash, dry, braid, twist, bun, yank, pull, don’t moisturize, heat style, go out in the sun your hair will suffer some level of damage.
