What is hair porosity?
Hair porosity is the way the cuticles are arranged. If they fit tightly together, the hair is low porosity, if the cuticles are very open, the hair is high porosity. There is also an intermediate porosity, that is, average (or normal) porosity.
Why is porosity determination important?
If we know the porosity of our hair, we know almost everything about it. It will be much easier to choose the care. We will not have to spend a lot of money on cosmetics that will turn out to be unsuitable for us. We will also be able to partially predict the effect of hairdressing treatments.
We can check the porosity of our hair in several different ways:
1. Water test - it consists in placing hair (about 10 pieces) on the surface of the water - in a glass or in a container. If the hair falls down quickly, we have high porosity hair, if it falls down after a few minutes - medium porosity. If they remain on the water surface, they are low porosity. However, this test is not 100% reliable because… we may put too much or too little hair, the hair may be covered with sebum or silicones, and this is resistance to water penetration.
2. Porosity can be checked by touch - we run our fingers along the length of the hair from its end to the root and check if the hair squeaks. If it is not smooth or you feel a lot of unevenness - we have high porosity hair. Slight unevenness proves that the hair is medium porosity. If we do not feel any resistance and the hair does not creak, we are owners of low porosity hair.
3. The most reliable source of information about porosity is microscopic examination. If you have a microscope, you can see how the cuticles of your hair are arranged.
4. In professional salons you can perform a trichological examination to determine the condition of our hair.
5. We can rely on some theories: curly hair is usually high porosity hair, while straight hair is medium porosity (normal porosity) or low porosity hair. If we regularly damage our hair with straightening, drying, dyeing, perming, bleaching, styling, we can be sure that our hair is not low porosity, and in many cases it may turn out to be high porosity.
