Who doesn’t want healthy, strong hair! Your journey to healthy hair begins by understanding your hair from inside out. Do you have to constantly deal with hair frizz? Does your hair break every time you brush it? If these are some of your common hair concerns, then maybe it’s time to bring hair porosity into the picture for you to understand your hair problems better. In fact, this can be the root cause of most of your hair care woes.
Before we tell you how to take care of hair porosity, let’s understand hair porosity better.
What is hair porosity?
To put it simply, hair porosity refers to how much moisture your hair can absorb and retain. This also depends largely on your hair type. For instance, curly hair tends to be more affected by porosity than other hair types since it loses moisture quickly. This does not imply that other hair types are immune to problems posed by porosity; it impacts different hair types in different ways. You can easily understand this if you know the structure of your hair better. Your hair is made of three layers:
• The cuticle: This is the tough, protective outer layer of your hair composed of smaller cuticles that overlap each other.
• The cortex: This is the thickest layer of your hair that contains fibrous proteins and the pigment that gives your hair its colour.
• The medulla: The medulla is the soft, central part of the hair shaft.
Hair porosity is divided into three broad categories:
• Low porosity: Hair that has low porosity has cuticles that are close together.
• Medium porosity: Hair that has medium porosity has cuticles that are less tightly bound.
• High porosity: Hair with high porosity has widely spaced cuticles.
For your hair to remain strong and healthy, the cuticle needs to absorb oils, water, and other hair care products to reach the cortex. However, if your hair has cuticles that are bound together closely, it becomes difficult for the products to penetrate your hair. Your hair doesn’t get enough moisture. Plus, when the cuticles are far apart from each other, your hair will have a tough time retaining moisture.
