Why Does My Hair Keep Breaking?

Researched and written by Curl Centric. Read by an AI voice.

Curly hair is not weak hair. We go through what dermatologists found when they looked for a weakness, and the everyday habits that cause most breakage.

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The full guide, with every source: Hair breakage.

Transcript

This is Curl Science by Curl Centric.

If your hair keeps breaking, it's natural to wonder whether your curls are just weak. The research points somewhere more useful. A lot of breakage comes from what happens to a strand during grooming, not from a defect in the proteins it's made of. And much of that damage can happen during a few minutes on wash day.

First, make sure it's breakage. It's normal to shed roughly 50 to 100 hairs a day, although the amount varies. If you don't detangle every day, several days of shed hair may come out at once.

Shed hairs are usually full-length strands with a tiny white bulb at the root. Breakage usually looks like shorter pieces without a bulb. You may find them in your comb, on your towel, or across your shoulders.

Now, the question of weak hair. A team of dermatologists examined hair from Black African volunteers, which is often described as fragile, and compared it with hair from Caucasian and Asian volunteers. They were looking for an abnormality in the cystine-rich proteins that help give hair its strength.

They didn't find one. The protein distribution looked similar across the groups. The researchers concluded that the damage they saw was consistent with physical trauma from grooming, not an inherited abnormality in those proteins.

That's good news, because how you handle your hair is something you can change.

An earlier study from the same lead researcher shows where some of that handling damage happens. Researchers examined more than 2,000 hairs combed from 12 African volunteers who had never used chemical treatments. Between 10% and 16% of those strands had knots. In hair from Caucasian and Asian volunteers, the combined rate was about 15 in 10,000. Many of the African strands also showed signs of repeated breakage.

Tightly coiled hair wraps around neighboring strands and around itself, so it knots more easily. When your comb hits a knot, it may pull the knot loose or snap the strand at that spot. Looser curls knot less often, but the same thing can happen when they do.

Now here's the part that changes what you do on wash day. It's about what water does to your hair.

In one laboratory study, researchers soaked hair in water and stretched the strands until they broke. The wet hair swelled about 10% wider. Under those testing conditions, it also began to give way permanently at about one-third of the stress required at normal room humidity.

That study used hair from one donor, so treat the exact numbers as a guide. But the direction matches decades of research showing that water softens hair and changes how it responds to force.

There's a second half to it. Wet hair also stretched much farther before it finally snapped. So wet hair isn't brittle. It's soft and flexible. It gives way more easily, and it stretches before it breaks. Stretch it far enough, and it may not spring all the way back even if it doesn't snap.

So is wet hair the problem? Not exactly. Detangling tightly coiled hair while it's dry can create more friction and make knots harder to remove. That's why dry detangling often leaves you with a sink full of broken pieces.

The goal isn't to avoid water. It's to reduce the force you put on your hair while it's wet and soft.

That's what conditioner is for during detangling. It gives your strands slip, so your fingers and comb can glide through instead of catching. Less catching means less force on your hair, and less force means fewer strands giving way.

Here's what that looks like on wash day.

Detangle with conditioner still in your hair, not after you've rinsed it out. Separate your hair into sections so you're only working with a small amount at a time.

Use your fingers first to find the knots because your fingers can feel a knot before a comb tears through it. Then comb from your ends, working toward your roots a little at a time.

When you find a single-strand knot, you don't have to fight it. Pulling it loose may snap the strand at the knot anyway. Use sharp hair shears to snip it off as close to the knot as possible.

After you rinse, gently squeeze out the water and blot your hair. Rubbing wet curls with a towel adds friction when your hair is soft and easier to damage.

So how do you know whether it's working? Use what's already coming out of your comb.

Every wash day, detangle over a light-colored towel and look at what comes out. Set aside the full strands with a bulb as shedding. The shorter pieces are what you're watching for breakage. If your shedding suddenly increases too, don't ignore that.

Give your new routine about eight weeks. If the pile of shorter pieces is getting smaller, your changes are helping.

One more thing. Breakage along your lengths and ends is often connected to handling. But if you're seeing bald patches, a thinning hairline, hair breaking close to your scalp, or a scalp that itches, burns, or flakes, make an appointment with a dermatologist. Those can be signs of something a routine change won't fix.

Your curls aren't defective. They're soft when wet, they knot where they coil, and they can break where they catch. Take out the force, and you keep more of what you grow.

We put the seven most common causes of breakage and a weekly routine to stop them into a free guide. It's at curlcentric.com/keep-the-length, and the link is in the show notes.

That's it for this episode. If it helped, follow Curl Science in your podcast app so the next one reaches you, and leave us a rating while you're there. Curl Science is researched and written by the Curl Centric team, and it's read by an AI voice.