What is a heat protectant spray? Is it 1 product missing from your regime?

If you're a regular user of blow dryers, curling irons and flat iron hair straighteners, repeated high heat on your hair shaft will result in more brittle hair and more breakages. There's moisture inside each hair shaft and heat styling dries that out. By using a heat protection spray, you're reducing that damage.

Hair care professionals recommend you use heat protection on your hair every time you use a heat styling device, whether it's a flat iron, curling wand, hair dryer or something else. The curlier and coarser your hair, the more heat you need to use to style, so it's particularly important for thicker hair and curlier hair.

Your spray will coat each hair shaft with a coating that has a high smoke point, offering some protection as you heat style. If you think of heat protectant spray like sunscreen for your hair. You get some protection, but it doesn't mean you can be excessive with the heat either. Use what you need to use so you can get your style and nothing more.

You want enough heat protectant spray to coat each hair shaft, but not too much to weigh it down too much. You can spritz it on to dry or damp hair. Dry hair will need a little more spray. Experiment until you get it right. Once you have added the spray, disperse evenly through the hair with a comb or your favourite bamboo hair brush, then style.

You can use some pure oils as a heat protectant if you don't have a spray at home and you don't have time to buy one. It's important that you ensure you only use a pure oil that has a high smoke point. We recommend argan oil. If you use anything with a low smoke point, you can end up cooking your hair. Grapeseed oil is a great option too, but it's not readily found in people's homes.

According to Trefor Evans PhD as referenced in this article from Shape.com, hair starts to break down at around 240°C. The average blow dry will probably heat your hair up to 80°C which is well below completely destroying your hair. It's when you start picking up curling irons and flat irons that apply heat directly from a ceramic or metal surface that you start getting in to the danger zone.

On their highest settings, many direct contact styling tools can reach 232°C which is dangerously close to being able to permanently destroy your hair. The real danger zone starts around 200°C so in a perfect world, you don't want to get near that. The more heat you apply and the more damage you do, the more breakage you're going to get. Repeated heat application affects the tensile strength of your hair shaft. Think of it like a piece of elastic that has a bit of stretch in it, but if you stretch it too far, it snaps. The more heat you apply, the less you can stretch it before it will break.