Unlocking Moisture and Scalp Health: Say Yes to Hair Steaming.

Hair steaming has been around for many years, manly being used for hair color processing, but is now being embraced by the curly hair community (as it should be)!

Hair Steaming

Hair Steamers resemble the dome-like hair dryers you probably remember your grandma sitting under on her weekly trip to get her hair set and styled. However, instead of blowing warm air, they release heated steam over your locks, usually utilized during conditioning treatments or color processing, but I prefer to use mine on my curly clients.

As you may know, curls can be tricky to moisturise correctly due to the actual shape of the hair strand itself. Under a microscope, straight hair tends to be more circular in diameter, whereas, curly strands are more flat. This poses an issue when it comes to pushing water- AKA moisture- into the hair while washing. Getting it to stay in the hair is another pesky problem...but not with a hair steamer!

Steaming Treatment

When visiting your favorite spa for a therapeutic facial, they use a "facial steamer" during the process. The warm steam encourages the pores of our skin to remain open, allowing the applied products to penetrate deeper where they can work their magic. Once the products are applied, the steaming stops and the skin cools, allowing the pores to slowly close, locking in the nutrients. After leaving, your skin is glowing, this is your skin's way of saying "thank you!"

Our hair works the same way except the "pores" are called "cuticles" and they are a big fan of steam, too.

The steam is applied for 15-20 minutes, during which time you get to simply relax, take a cat nap, meditate (you get the gist) while the steamer does all the work. Generally used in combination with a conditioning treatment decided by your hair type and its current condition.

Hair steaming isn't just the answer to your parched hair problems, it's excellent for scalp health and that is rather significant since just below the scalp (epidermis) is where all the magic happens! Generally speaking, when we refer to our scalp we think only of the scalp we can see, but the conditions underneath our scalp play a vital role in how strong our hair will be.