 Hey guys, welcome back to my channel or welcome if you're new. So I'm sorry if the audio is off or there's a little bit of an echo. This is my first sit-down video that I'm filming in my new apartment. So I'm still trying to figure things out. I think maybe once I get my couch in here that should solve the echo problem. If not, maybe I'll just start filming in the bedroom. So in today's video, I wanted to share how to repair damaged hair. And if your hair is damaged, how to quickly get it to grow out. These are tips that I'm sharing not only just as a professional because I am a hairdresser, but these are also from personal experience. So these are tried and true methods because trust me, my hair has been destroyed many a time. And this video is sponsored by Lily Silk. So thank you so much to them. I will talk about them a little bit more in just a second but getting into the first tip, the easiest, simplest one. Stop coloring your hair. Now, usually whenever my hair was like really badly damaged, it was because I was bleaching it. So my hair at the time was blonde. And what I used to always do is just go back to dark hair. I would go back to something close to my natural color so that I could just leave it alone and let it grow out. Now you don't necessarily have to do this. If you have lightened hair and you like your hair lighter, you can keep it that way but I would just do something that is more low maintenance so that you're not constantly having to color it and do chemical treatments to it. So for example, adding some low lights to it, adding a little bit of a root, something that will allow your hair to grow out so that you don't have to constantly be coloring it every few weeks. A bad habit that I had was like I said, my hair would be bleached, it would be really damaged. So I would color it darker and then as soon as it seemed slightly healthy enough, I would miss my blonde hair and then I would bleach it again and then I'd be starting back at square one and my hair would be damaged again. So if you know that you like lighter hair, leave it be but just do something a little bit more low maintenance so that you're not constantly having to color and bleach it because the more you do that, the longer it's gonna take to get your hair healthy. The next thing that you wanna do is just be more gentle with your hair and really baby it. There's a few different ways to do that. Number one is to use a silk pillowcase. And this one that I have is from Lily Silk, the sponsor of today's video. There are so many benefits to using a silk pillowcase, not even just for your hair, for your skin as well. It's gonna create less friction and a lot of people I think don't realize how damaged their hair can actually get while they're sleeping. Especially if you're somebody that tosses and turns a lot throughout the night, getting a silk pillowcase is gonna be a lot more gentle on your hair. It's gonna prevent breakage. Lily Silk pillowcases are breathable, they're hypoallergenic, they're antibacterial and they retain moisture. All of their products are made from the finest 100% pure mulberry silk and the highest grade 6A long silk fibers. Only 5% of silk in the world meets the standard. So you know that you're gonna get really good quality with Lily Silk. The shirt actually that I'm wearing is from them as well and it is just so comfortable. I love it. So yeah, you're definitely gonna wanna get yourself a silk pillowcase because it will make a huge difference. I'll have a link down below and a discount code to Lily Silk in the description. So go check that out. But speaking of sleeping, another thing that you can do to help be gentle with your hair is when you do go to sleep, tie your hair up in a loose braid. If you just leave your hair loose when you're sleeping and again, you're a little bit of a rough sleeper, you toss and turn a lot. Your hair is most likely going to get tangled. It's just gonna be a mess. So keeping it all nice and neat and just like a nice loose braid will also help prevent breakage. You also wanna stop with the really tight ponytails. If your hair is already very fragile and damaged to begin with, think about it. The more tension and pressure you're putting on your hair by having it pulled back in a really, really tight ponytail or bun, it's just adding more stress and strain to your hair. So it's going to create more breakage. So you wanna just be really gentle, only do loose braids, loose, low ponytails and buns. You also wanna stop using those little tight hair ties and instead start using something softer and something that's gonna create less tension like a scrunchie. Lily Silk also actually makes silk scrunchies. So it's kind of perfect because it's nice and gentle on your hair. It's not gonna tug at it. Your hair's not gonna get tangled in it and it's also made of silk. So it's going to be extra gentle on your hair. Next, you wanna start using a gentler brush. So rather than using a brush with really tight, strong bristles or comb, you wanna get something that has flexible bristles like this brush does. This is the detangling brush from Fraymar. Wet brushes are also really great. The tangled teasers are really good options too. Anything that is soft like this. As long as the bristles can move very easily and are very flexible and bendable, that way they're not creating as much tension on your hair. So when you're brushing through your hair, if there are any tangles, the teeth of the brush are not gonna just rip right through it and break your hair off. I also suggest not brushing through your hair when it's wet. When your hair's wet, it's most fragile. Any kind of brushing or touching your hair really at all while it's wet is just going to add to the breakage. So wait till your hair is dry and then use a gentle brush like this. You also wanna be careful with the way that you brush your hair. So again, you wanna do it on dry hair and you wanna start from the bottom. I don't wanna brush through my hair right now because with these curls, it's just gonna get really poofy. But start from the bottom and very gently work your way up. You don't wanna start up here and just rip through your hair. Start at the bottom, hold it in your other hand and just very gently brush through. The next thing that you wanna start doing is wash your hair less often. I'm sure you've heard this a million times that, oh, you shouldn't wash your hair that often so that way your natural oils can come through. And yes, that's absolutely true, but also if you think about it, if your hair is in this really fragile state and you want to just leave it alone as much as possible, going through the process of washing it, it's just adding more stress to your hair. So you wanna try to cut back as much as possible. A lot of the times damaged hair is gonna be pretty dry too. So you probably don't even really need to be shampooing it as often as you do with healthy hair. So I would try to cut back to like one to two times a week. Whenever you are washing your hair, you wanna make sure that you're using good, high quality salon products. The cheap drugstore stuff is fine if your hair is already healthy and you don't really color it or do much to it, but if your hair is already damaged to begin with, the cheap stuff is just gonna make the situation worse. So it's really, really important. If you're trying to nourish your hair back to health, you want to make sure that you're using good products and really investing in your hair. Think about it, right? If you're really sick, you're not gonna wanna go out and get fast food, right? That's just going to make things worse. You wanna nourish your body with healthy foods, probably like soup with some vegetables, same thing with your hair. So one of my favorites is the Olaplex Shampoo and Conditioner. It's actually meant for damaged hair. It's color safe and it's going to really nourish it and make your hair feel super soft. And you don't have to worry about it being too harsh or stripping your hair too much or anything like that. Speaking of Olaplex, I also suggest getting their number three treatment that's for damaged hair. All you have to do is get your hair wet, put some of this through it, make sure you're evenly distributing it and then leave it on for a minimum of 10 minutes. Trust me, this stuff is God sent. It has saved my hair so many times. One time I overbleached my hair. I was still in beauty school at the time. Needless to say, I was rinsing the foils out in the sink and literally just clumps of my hair were just breaking right off. So I immediately went and got some Olaplex, left it on my hair for about an hour, rinsed it out and my hair felt like hair again. It was amazing. Now this isn't magic, okay? So if your hair is really, really badly damaged, this isn't going to all of a sudden make it perfectly healthy and good to go overnight, but it does help and make a big difference. Olaplex has a big range of products, but I would say the ones that you really need are just the shampoo and conditioner and then the number three treatment. The next thing that you want to do is use at least less heat, if not no heat at all. I know this can be kind of tricky for some people. It was tricky for me. If your hair is damaged, the last thing that you want to be doing is using a lot of heat on it. So I really suggest just finding some heatless hairstyles that work for you. My go-to style that I always did when I had damaged hair was braids. I would just do two Dutch braids all the way back and it was easy because it would just be out of my face and I had a lot of like broken pieces and a lot of short layers too. So that was like the easiest thing for me so that it still looked kind of cute and you couldn't really tell that it was really damaged. The next thing that you're gonna want to do is get regular trims. I know some people hate getting their hair cut, especially if you want to grow your hair out, you want long hair. The last thing you want to do is cut any of it off, but sometimes it's just past the point of any repair. So the best thing to do is just keep getting trims, let your hair grow out and then keep cutting off all the dead stuff off of the ends. And it's really important to do this because if you have split ends or breakage, if you just leave them be, they're just gonna keep breaking and keep breaking, keep splitting and it's just gonna work its way up the hair strand. So the best thing to do is just cut the split ends, cut the breakage off first. Obviously our hair goes out of our scalp but the healthier you can keep your ends, the faster your hair will be able to grow and the healthier it will be. Another thing that you can do to kind of help promote your hair growing, honestly I've never really found success in hair vitamins. You can try those if you want, but the best thing that's always worked for me is just drinking water, exercising and eating a lot of fruits and vegetables. I know it's like very basic and boring but I've always noticed that when I'm working out consistently, that's when my hair seems to grow the fastest. The next thing that you can do that will kind of help the whole process of growing your hair out is getting extensions. Now you wanna be careful because there are some extensions that if your hair's already damaged, it's not gonna be good, it's just going to add to the damage. For example, tape and extensions. I have had tapens plenty of times in the past, I love them and they're great if your hair's already healthy but if your hair is very fragile, they're not a good option. So what I would suggest is if you're looking for a primer permanent type of extension doing the beaded wefts, I actually have a client that had the thinnest, most brittle hair. No matter what she did, it was just very thin and her ends were really, really stringy. She always had a lot of breakage and especially underneath like the bottom layer of her hair just would not grow past her shoulders. So she went and got beaded weft extensions and after just a few months of having those extensions in, her hair started growing so much and it was really looking a lot fuller. I can say from personal experience to any time my hair was damaged and I put extensions in, it helped my natural hair grow and get healthy because the extensions really cover and protect your natural hair. You're usually not putting heat on your natural hair as much because most of the heat typically you're just putting on the extensions, you're not washing your hair as often and also that way you have the extensions so your hair looks nice and long and full and beautiful during that process of growing it out. So yeah, if you're looking for a permanent extension I would say the beaded wefts. If you're looking for something that you can just take in and out each day, I would say the halo extensions that come with just like the clear string that you just put on top of your head. I wouldn't do the clip-ins because again those can kind of tug on your hair and create a little bit too much tension and the last thing to do is just be patient and I know that that sucks to hear. I've been there, you know, and it's awful when you have damaged hair, when it's really short and all you want is for it to just grow and be healthy. It's not gonna happen overnight. It is gonna take some time. If you follow all of these tips it definitely will help speed the process up but it's still gonna take a few months. So just try to be patient, fight the urge you have to color it, to put heat on it, just try to leave it be as much as you can and I promise it will get there. It will get healthy. So those are all of my tips. I hope that you found this video helpful. Don't forget to check the link in my description to Lily Silk. Thank you so much again to them for sponsoring this video and let me know if there's any other hair dilemmas that you would like my advice on and I'll see you guys in my next video. Bye.