Hair straightening 101

I looked at the VIXEN blog about straighteners, and I was inspired to do my own.
I have a lot of history with straighteners, and kind of a love/hate relationship. It makes my hair look smooth and shiny, and I want to straighten it all the time, but heat what so ever is always bad for the hair and should be used with thought.

But I have my tips and tricks when I do use them that I've learned from own experience, other people and in hairdressing school/other hairdressers how to keep it as healthy for your hair as possible.

This is the straightener I am currently using

Use a decent straightener.

I love mine from GHD and it is one of the most gentle straighteners/hairstyling tools on the marked. If you are going to invest in a straightener, might as well wait until you have a good one.

Use heat protection 

There is nothing more crucial then this. I learned a tricks with this the other day in school, take heat protection on one of your hands, now blow dry them both, you can feel the hand without the heat protection cooks a lot faster and get's red faster. This is basically what you are doing to your hair.

Heating it up too high

Heat damage the hair and try to keep it as low as possible to break the hair as little as possible.

Straightening your curls the wrong way

If you want to keep your locks healthy and shiny, brush through your hair and use a comb next to the straighter. The thing about tangles, if you use heat on them you "burn" them into your hair and damage the place where your tangle are. And the comb will make the hair straighter all at once because it's not flying everywhere and it keeps it in place so the heat spreads evenly.

Hair oil/straightening cream

After you've heated your hair, make sure to feed it with some oil or a product with a little hold it. It will smooth out any electric hair strands and give it the perfect finish.
Personally I prefer oil, because this nurture the hair as well. But if you have struggles with greasy hair, stick with the cream.

Start from the bottom and work your way up

This is basically because our top layer of hair gets the hardest handling, meaning it will be flatter because of pillows, hats and other things. Sometimes you don't even need to straighten it and the job will be done quicker.