by Rebecca Mikulin

Created on: March 21, 2009   Last Updated: March 22, 2009

Healthy hair is a lot of work, yet what it adds to your looks (for both men and women) and self esteem is certainly worth the effort. Whether you want to grow your hair long or just want to keep what you have looking great, here are a few helpful tips. These tips can work very well for keeping new growth healthy and can, to some extent, aid in the healing of already-damaged hair. If you don't want the aggravating work of repairing severely-damaged old growth, consider cutting it off and starting fresh. With proper care it will grow back FAST!

Let me give you a picture of what my hair used to look like...I rarely ever used a blow dryer, never colored and only permed it once. I couldn't understand why mid-back seemed to be the "terminal length" for my hair, as far as I knew I was doing the right things to care for it. I thought perhaps the very fine hairs would just always break too easily to grow out. I wanted much longer hair, so my sister helpfully directed me to some online resources for proper hair care that really taught me a lot about what I was doing wrong. Without further ado, here are some common mistakes that cause a lot of damage to hair.

Primary Sources of Hair Damage:

Hair Dryers, Curling Irons, Coloring, Perming - This one is pretty much a given. Most people know that all these things that apply heat or chemicals to the hair will damage it, but just in case I've thrown it in to stress just how important it is to avoid these for truly healthy hair.

Combing and Hair Accessories - Avoid combing your hair when it's wet and always comb from the bottom on up to avoid breaking hairs by unexpectedly hitting a tangle. Wet hair catches in the comb easier and can also stretch, causing stress that will later turn into splits. Many hair accessories have rough edges, metal tags that wear on the hair, or tangle easily and cause damage during removal.

Drying Hair After Washing - No, I'm not talking about hair dryers again...I'm talking about your towel. I used to always wrap my hair in a twist of towel on top of my head until most of the water had soaked into the towel then flip my hair over my head and "scrub" it with the towel to get as much additional water out as possible. Not only does this cause breakage and possibly additional tangles, it causes stress all along the hair length. If you have a LOT of little hairs that are significantly shorter than the rest it could be due to breakage caused by this kind of stress.

Chlorine - Do you wear a bathing cap when you

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