Rice Water for Hair Growth: Does It Work, and How to Make It

Lately, we've been asked if there are benefits to using rice water for hair and skin care. We've seen several before and after photos, which are often misleading.

Can rice water rinses prevent hair breakage?

Does rice water help your hair grow?

What are the benefits of using rice water for natural hair?

How to Use Rice Water on Hair

The best way to use rice water is to apply it on wet hair after shampooing and before conditioning. Ensure your hair and scalp are thoroughly saturated with water. Then, massage the rice water into your roots for optimal absorption.

Rice water is packed with beneficial nutrients like inositol and amino acids. However, it doesn't replace hair conditioner. Due to its high starch content, always follow up with a moisturizing conditioner. A moisturizing conditioner will help you prevent dryness.

If you want a more thorough treatment, try using rice water as a mask before shampooing. Just apply it to damp hair for 20 minutes, then rinse and continue with your usual shampoo routine.

Key Takeaways

What rice water is: the starchy water left after rinsing, soaking, or boiling rice. It's mostly starch, with small amounts of B vitamins, minerals and inositol.

What the research covers: rice bran extract, in mice. The one study on rice water itself was run in a lab on hair samples by researchers at a cosmetics company that was developing rice water extracts.

What it won't do: change how fast your hair grows. Growth happens in the follicle, and a rinse doesn't reach it.

What it might do: lower friction between your strands, which means less breakage when you detangle, which means you keep more of the length you already grow.

How to use it: on clean, wet hair, 20 minutes, once a week to start, always followed by a moisturizing conditioner.

Who should skip the fermented version: anyone with a broken, raw, or actively flaking scalp, eczema or dermatitis, or a compromised immune system.

What Is Rice Water?

In short, rice water is the starchy water obtained by draining boiled rice.

To make your rice water, we recommend cooking rice in a pot of boiling water according to the cooking instructions on the package. The starch from the rice is released into the water, creating hair milk made from rice water.

Remove the rice, and you're done. This process creates what some people call "rice water hair milk." So, rice water is made from rice, obviously. It's water that has either cooked or soaked rice grains and has absorbed many of its best qualities.

Primarily, rice water contains rice starch.

Rice naturally contains starches. In fact, its starch content is very high at around 70% to 80%. When it is heated, boiled, or even rinsed, those starches are released into the water.

The water that remains is the rice water. It will have a whiteish color (depending on the color of the rice itself) and a somewhat grainy or milky texture.

Brief History of Using Rice Water for Hair Growth

Rice water has two well-documented homes. In Huangluo, China, the Yao women have washed their hair with it for generations, and their village sits in the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest-haired village in the world.

In Japan, court women of the Heian period rinsed with yu-su-ru, the water left over from washing rice, and called the result suberakashi. There is surviving artwork of them with floor-length hair.

Both are real traditions, and neither one is evidence. Nobody ran a comparison group in the eighth century, and the Yao women aren't only doing one thing differently from you.

What the Research Actually Says

Almost every article you'll read on rice water points to the same handful of studies. So we went and read them, and what we found changed how we write about this.

The encouraging research is real research. It is just not research on rice water.

Want to listen on wash day instead? This video is also an episode of our podcast, Curl Science, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

The studies people cite tested rice bran extract, pulled out of the outer layer of the grain with pressurized carbon dioxide. That extract raised hair-growth signals in mice about as well as 3% minoxidil did, which is a genuinely interesting result. However, the compounds doing the work in it, gamma-oryzanol and linoleic acid, are oil-soluble, and they stay in the bran.

Your rinse is the other half of the grain. Water pulls starch out of the endosperm, and starch is most of what ends up in your jar.

That single distinction explains a lot of the confusion around this topic. It is also why you will see "rich in vitamin E" repeated everywhere, when vitamin E rides in the bran oil and does not meaningfully dissolve into water.

So what about the study on rice water itself?

There is one study on rice water itself. It was published in 2010 in the Journal of Society of Cosmetic Chemists of Japan. It reported that a rice rinse lowered surface friction and improved elasticity, and that inositol stayed in the hair after rinsing.

That's worth knowing. Here's the rest of it. The researchers tested the rinse on hair samples in a lab, not on anyone's head, and compared the results with untreated hair. The rice water also left flakes on the hair when it was used on its own. Because of that, the same team tested processed rice water extracts instead. All four researchers worked at a cosmetics company, and the paper presents those extracts as a more practical treatment. None of that makes the findings wrong. It means one small, company-run lab study is carrying a mountain of claims.

Can Rice Water Make Your Hair Grow Faster?

The short answer is no, and the reason is worth understanding, because it changes what you should expect from the rinse.

Hair grows from the follicle, several millimeters below the surface of your scalp. A rinse you leave on for 20 minutes and wash back out never reaches it.

The "two inches a month" figure floating around social media is not a small exaggeration. It is roughly six and a half times the fastest average anyone has measured on textured hair, and more than four times the Caucasian average.

Here's the number worth keeping instead. In the study above, individual growth rates ranged from 0.18 to 0.44 inches a month among volunteers of the same background, which is a two-and-a-half-fold spread between the slowest and the fastest.

Your follicles set that range, and no rinse renegotiates it.

But there is a second number that you can move, and it is the one that actually decides how long your hair gets. Researchers who measured 1,042 children with natural hair found that combed hair reaches a length it won't pass, usually within a year of a cut, because breakage eventually equals new growth.

In other words, your length isn't limited by how fast your hair grows. It's limited by how much of that growth survives your wash day.

That is the honest case for rice water, and it is a much smaller case than the one you will read elsewhere. If a rinse reduces friction between your strands, you comb through with less force, and less force means fewer snapped ends over a year.

The Internet is full of anecdotal evidence for the efficacy of rice water, but there is science behind it as well. Rice itself is full of essential vitamins and minerals, which are then transferred to the water when rice water is made.

These include vitamins B and C, which are terrific for hair. It also contains amino acids and antioxidants, which can help detox your hair.

The 2010 lab study is the only research on the rinse itself. In treated hair samples, it reported two effects: more elasticity and less surface friction.

Hair elasticity refers to how much a strand of hair can stretch before it breaks. The greater hair elasticity you have, the less breakage you will have in your hair.

It is especially great for women who like to style their hair in different ways since the styling process often entails a lot of pulling and stretching of the hair strands.

Reducing surface friction is also important for healthy hair. Friction is simply a word to describe one thing rubbing against another.

Surface hair friction mainly refers to hairs rubbing against each other (though hair friction also occurs when you comb, curl, straighten, dry, or style hair). More rubbing, or more friction, results in more hair damage.

Therefore, by increasing airflow between your hair strands and reducing surface friction, a rice water treatment can help keep your hair healthy.

In addition, there is no study on rice water and scalp health, though a milder, more acidic rinse is generally easier on a scalp than an alkaline one, especially if your scalp is dry, as it acts as a natural conditioner (as long as you don't use too much).

It can soothe your scalp (and skin) irritation as well, which can sometimes be the cause of dryness or even dandruff.

Finally, rice water can also make your hair shiny. The shiny factor is mostly based on anecdotal evidence since shininess is difficult to measure in a scientific manner.

Nonetheless, many rice water users report this pleasant side effect. So, we consider it one of many beauty benefits of using a rice water hair treatment.

How To Make Rice Water for Hair Care

There are a few different ways to make rice water, and we've included some good recipes in the next section. But let's look at some basics here.

In order to make rice water, you need to extract the rice starches from the rice grains. Since you're just extracting the starches, it doesn't really matter what kind of rice you use.

If you eat rice regularly, use the water from rinsing and cooking the rice. If not, you can buy inexpensive rice at any food store.

Making rice water is about as simple as making rice itself, though it is not the same exact process since when you cook rice, the grains absorb almost all of the water in the pot. Let's look at a few recipes.

Rice Water Recipes: How to Cook Rice Water for Hair

First, assemble your equipment and ingredients. You will need a saucepan, bowl, or pot (depending on what method you use), strainer, measuring cup, spray bottle, or something to put the finished rice water in, rice, and water. Easy enough!

Some recipes recommend rinsing the rice briefly in a fine-mesh sieve before preparing the rice water (so you would let this water wash down the drain).

While you will lose some starch, it will also wash away any impurities, which is a good thing.

However, it isn't absolutely necessary.

After rinsing, there are three main techniques that you can use. The first is soaking, which is the simplest. 

Soaking Method

• Put uncooked rice in a bowl and add about four times the amount of warm water (a good baseline is a half-cup of rice and two cups of water).
• Let it sit for about 30 minutes until the water becomes cloudy and opaque.
• Strain the contents of the bowl through a sieve, capturing the water in another container.
• Add to a spray bottle, and the rice water is ready to use with your hair care routine.

With the soaking method, you will probably not need to dilute the rice water any further.

Boiling Method

A lot of people prefer the boiling method because heat aids in starch extraction. However, the rice water may come out grainier.

The other benefit of the boiling method is that the rice is also ready to be eaten after the water is strained.

• Add a half-cup of uncooked rice and two cups of water to a saucepan or pot.
• Bring to a boil over medium-high heat.
• Reduce the heat, but allow the rice to boil for approximately 15 minutes.
• Keep an eye on it to make sure that the water isn't evaporating too quickly. If it is, turn down the heat more or cover the pot.
• Strain the rice and reserve the water.
• Eat the rice in your favorite rice dish.

Fermentation Method (Creating Fermented Rice Water)

The last method for making rice water at home is the fermentation method. A lot of people, including celebrities, swear by fermentation.

This is because the process lowers the pH level of the water, which aids in the absorption of vitamins and minerals and can be less irritating to the skin.

• Use a half-cup to one cup of rice and soak in two cups of water for 20 minutes.
• Stir rice every five minutes.
• Strain the water through a sieve (you'll notice that this is very similar to the first few steps of the soaking method).
• Let it sit somewhere warm for 12 to 24 hours, then move it straight to the refrigerator. It should smell faintly sour, not sharp or unpleasant.
• Once your rice water smells sour, transfer it to the refrigerator. It is fermented and ready to go.

Rice Water Shampoo

Bonus: You can make shampoo from your rice water, so we thought that we'd add those instructions in the recipe section as well.

• Make rice water with one of the first two methods above.
• Add all-natural soap nuts to the strained rice water.
• The soap nuts should dissolve and turn the mixture soapy. You can add more water if needed.
• We recommend making it a little at a time and storing it in the refrigerator to prolong its useful life.

Always store rice water in the refrigerator and shake it up before using it.

How Much Rice and Water Do You Need?

The recipes above give you the ratios. The planner below turns them into the amounts for your own hair.

What's Growing in Fermented Rice Water

Fermenting is the step almost every rice water tutorial tells you to take, and almost none of them tell you what is happening in the jar while you wait.

Here's the part that surprised me. The lower pH that fermentation produces is the single most defensible mechanism on this whole page.

Researchers who measured 123 shampoos showed that alkaline products raise the fiber's negative surface charge, and that raises friction and breakage.

So an acidic rinse is a reasonable idea. Leaving a jar of it on your kitchen counter for three days is a less reasonable way to get one.

If you want the fermented version, ferment it for 12 to 24 hours somewhere warm, then move it straight to the refrigerator and use it within three days. Don't re-warm it, don't top up an old batch with a fresh one, and wash the bottle between batches.

And if your scalp is broken, raw, actively flaking, or you're dealing with eczema or dermatitis, use the plain soaked version instead. There's no upside worth the trade.

How Do You Use Rice Water on Your Hair?

One important step to note: always shake your rice water before using it!

The elements within the treatment can separate while it sits, but shaking it will recombine them.

1. Make your own shampoo or conditioner with rice water (see recipe above). This is a great option for ladies with dry scalps since it dilutes the rice water and avoids direct application. Keep in mind, though, that rice water is perishable, so just make a little bit at a time.
2. Use rice water as a hair and scalp spray treatment after shampooing. After shampooing and conditioning your hair, spray rice water onto the hair and scalp generously. Massage it in if you want extra absorption. You can cover your head with a shower cap to prevent drying. Leave it on your hair for about 20 to 30 minutes, and then rinse thoroughly.
3. Use it in the shower as a rinse. You can also shampoo your hair and then rinse it with rice water. This is best for oily hair or if you wash your hair almost every day. Let it stay on your hair for a few minutes, rinse thoroughly with regular water, and use a conditioner once the rice water is rinsed out if needed.

The Benefits of Using Rice Water on Your Hair

For example, during the Heian time, many women combed their hair each day using Yu-Su-Ru (i.e., rice water). The thought was that rice water would reduce hair breakage and increase elasticity.

The Side Effects of Using Rice Water

Rice water has a reputation for causing "protein overload," and the effect people describe is real even though the name isn't quite right.

Hair that has been rinsed too often, or with too concentrated a batch, goes stiff and straw-like and snaps more easily. That's the complaint, and you'll find thousands of women describing it.

However, rice water is overwhelmingly starch. The measured protein content of a rice rinse is low, and the residue sitting on your strands is far more likely to be starch and mineral deposits than protein.

The distinction matters for what you do about it. A protein overload calls for a moisture treatment; a starch coating calls for a proper cleanse.

If your hair goes stiff, dull, or gritty after a few rinses, clarify with a shampoo, skip the rice water for two or three wash days, and come back at half the strength.

Dryness is the other common complaint, and it's more likely if your hair or scalp already runs dry. Because of the starch, always follow a rice water rinse with a moisturizing conditioner.

We recommend starting with once a week and holding there for a month before you change anything.

Scientific studies on the use of rice water have revealed few detrimental effects, and the anecdotal evidence bears this out, too.

One of the only drawbacks is dryness, which is more likely if you already have dry hair or scalp. On the flip side, though, appropriate use of rice water can help restore a healthy balance to your scalp, which can eventually reduce dryness.

The 2010 study cited above notes that one of the less pleasant side effects of using rice water on hair is flaking, often a result of dryness.

However, they also discovered that using rice water extract, which you can purchase online, can eliminate this problem.

There are no known elements or ingredients that interfere negatively with rice water. No safety problems have been reported on color-treated hair, though nobody has formally studied it either.

Since it can have a drying effect, if you have very dry or curly hair, limit your use of the hair treatment to once a week.

In general, we recommend starting out using rice water only once or twice a week and building from there if you still aren't seeing the results that you want.

How To Test Rice Water on Your Own Hair

Every before-and-after photo you've seen on this subject shares the same problem. There's no way to tell what else changed between the two pictures: the lighting, the length of time, the trim, the styling, the other four products she started using the same month.

So here's a way to find out what rice water does on your hair specifically, which is the only result that matters to you.

Pick two sections of hair on the same side of your head, roughly the same length and thickness. Treat one with rice water on every wash day and leave the other alone, keeping everything else in your routine identical.

Nothing here asks you to break a strand off your head. You already lose 50 to 100 hairs a day no matter what you do, and those are all the material this test needs.

Every two weeks, detangle each section separately over a light towel and sort what comes out. Full-length strands with a tiny white bulb on the end are normal shedding. The short pieces with no bulb are breakage, and they're the ones that count.

Count the short pieces for each section, and note how dry each one feels. Fewer broken pieces on the treated side is the entire thing you're looking for.

If you want a third measure, take one of the shed strands you just sorted out, wet it, and pull it gently between your fingers. That strand is already off your head, so nothing is lost, and more give before it resists means more give when your comb catches a knot.

Eight weeks is long enough to see a difference and short enough to actually finish.

If the treated section doesn't hold up better than the untreated one after eight weeks, you have your answer, and it cost you a bag of rice.

Frequently Asked Questions

Navigating the world of rice water for hair can spark many questions. Dive into our FAQ section below to find answers to some of the most commonly asked questions.

It might seem impossible, but some women see hair growth results from using rice water pretty quickly. The one study that measured this directly found Afro-textured hair growing about 0.31 inches a month on average, against about 0.47 inches for Caucasian hair.

Some women claim that hair treated with rice water, though, can grow approximately two inches per month. Nobody has measured a scalp growing anywhere near that fast. The chart below shows the claim against the numbers we do have.

To put it in perspective, textured hair that isn't treated will grow a little under four inches a year (on average). Adding a rice water treatment to your routine will not speed that up; what it can do is help you keep more of the length you already grow.

Rice water will not make individual strands thicker, either; what you may notice is that less breakage leaves your ends looking fuller.

Your hair grows at the same rate whether it is healthy or damaged; since rice water helps increase elasticity and reduce surface friction, what changes is how much of that growth survives to become length.

Notice that we say rice water can help you keep length, and not that it will make your hair grow faster.

It should be noted that, according to Dr. Dennis Gross, a dermatologist in New York City, there are no studies that prove that rice water itself can actually promote hair growth.

However, another New York dermatologist, Dr. Neil Sadick, noted no harmful effects. If your hair ends up growing faster after starting a rice water regimen, then that's great.

How Often Should Rice Water Be Used for Hair?

Generally speaking, twice a week is enough for most hair types. If you have dry or curly hair, start with once a week and see what effect that has. If your hair is especially oily, you may need to use the treatment three times per week for results.

You want to use rice water on clean hair, so don't use it more frequently than you wash your hair.

How Much Water Do You Put In Rice Water?

The amount of water you use depends on your method of preparation. If you soak the rice, use about three to four times as much water as rice. The rice will absorb very little water, so this ratio makes a lot of rice water.

What Herbs Can You Add Into Rice Water for Your Hair?

Nothing in rice water is known to react badly with common add-ins, so you have some room to experiment.

We love using rosemary oil, lavender oil, ylang-ylang oil, and clary sage oil. You can also put in a sprig of rosemary or mint, a small piece of orange peel, or other naturally good-smelling elements. These are great ingredients to enhance your treatment.

Two things to keep in mind: first, you're going to be rinsing the rice water out, so there's a good chance that your hair won't end up smelling like whatever you add anyway. It usually just enhances the olfactory experience while you're doing the treatment.

In addition, if you plan to let rice water sit, elements and particles from the additive will seep into the water as well. This likely won't be harmful, but you may want to look into it first.

If you decide to add something to the rice water, make sure that you do so after it ferments. Adding anything beforehand can affect that process, and it will be difficult to tell whether the fermentation is complete since its most noticeable quality is the smell.

What Is the Best Rice to Use for Rice Water?

The truth is that it probably doesn't make a huge difference what kind of rice you use. Be wary of someone trying to sell you an expensive rice extract because of the type of rice used to make it.

You can use brown rice or white rice; long-grain, medium-grain, or short-grain; and jasmine, arborio, basmati, and even wild rice will all work. This is because it is mainly the starch that you want.

We suggest playing around with different types of rice to figure out which one works best for you. Many users prefer to use organic rice.

This is not because organic rice is in any way more effective but because some people prefer the growing practices of organic farming.

Those differences are too complex for the scope of this article, but if you've switched to mostly organic or locally grown foods, you may want organic rice for your rice water as well, even if it costs a little more.

Rice water does reach your scalp, and a milder, more acidic rinse is easier on it than an alkaline one. What it will not do is repair a follicle. Follicles sit several millimeters down, and nothing you rinse out after 20 minutes gets to them. If your scalp is the thing bothering you, treat the scalp directly rather than hoping a rinse handles it.

Sources: Inamasu et al., Journal of Society of Cosmetic Chemists of Japan 2010;44(1):29–33, a laboratory study on hair samples; Sivakumar et al., Journal of Food Science and Technology 2024.

How To Store Rice Water for Hair

Storing rice water is pretty simple. Storing it in a spray bottle is best since that's what you'll probably use to apply it to your hair.

Rice water is perishable and, therefore, needs to be stored in the refrigerator. For that reason, we don't recommend making a lot of rice water at a time. Small batches are best!

An unfermented batch keeps about four to five days in the fridge. A fermented one gets three, and never gets re-warmed. After that, it won't harm you, especially since you aren't ingesting it. But you want the freshest product possible, so throw it away at least within a week.

Related Articles

• How Often Should I Massage My Scalp for Hair Growth
• How Long Does It Take to Grow Your Hair
• Why Does My Hair Grow So Fast?
• How to Measure Hair Length

So, is rice water good for your hair? I think so, but I don't really know (honestly).

What I can tell you now that I could not before is exactly how thin the evidence is, and where the thin part sits. The research everyone points to is about a different part of the rice grain, and the one study on the rinse itself was a small lab test on hair samples.

However, the rinse is cheap, it's easy to make, and nothing in the literature suggests it is doing harm to a healthy scalp. That's a reasonable set of conditions for an experiment on yourself.

So run the eight-week test above rather than trusting anyone's before-and-after photo, including ours. If your hair holds up better on the treated side, keep going.