What Is Hair Porosity For Natural Hair?

What Is Hair Porosity For Natural Hair?

Hair porosity is about how well your hair is able to absorb and hold moisture.

It is usually genetic, but other factors can also affect it. For example,  exposure, heat treatments, and chemical processing. This blog post delves deeper to explain what hair porosity is.

High Porosity

     hair porosity: Woman Behind A Tree playing with hair

High porosity hair absorbs too much moisture into your hair. This can leave it more prone to frizzing.

Using products such as our leave-in conditioner helps contain the moisture you apply to your hair. You can also layer up further with a hair butter, to help fill in the gaps in your hair cuticles and protect your hair from loosing too much moisture.

Medium Porosity

hair porosity: young girl touching natural hair

Medium porosity hair probably requires the least maintenance, compared to high and low hair porosity. This is often referred to as 'normal porosity hair'.

It allows just the right amount of moisture to enter, whilst also preventing too much from exiting.

Deep treatments with protein can be used on high porosity hair. However, not on a daily basis. only when the hair needs treatment.

Low Porosity

hair porosity: woman with hand on chin

Low porosity hair is more likely to have build-up from protein-rich products, like deep conditioning for example. This can leave your hair feeling, dry and stiff.

If you have low hair porosity, try using products that are protein-free and use moderate heat, with as a conditioning cap for example, when using protein-free deep conditioning treatments. This helps open the tight cuticles.

Why Find Out Your Hair Porosity?

Knowing your hair porosity can help you recognize what products are best to help your hair well-moisturized and enhance its strength.

How To Know Your Hair Porosity

Each strand of our hair is built up of three layers. The cuticle (outermost layer), the cortex (the middle layer) and the medulla (the innermost layer). There are different tests to help identify your hair porosity. The float test is one often used:

  • The Float Test: Take a few strands of your hair from one of your hair tools. The drop them into a bowl of water. Leave them for around 2-4minutes. If your hair floats, you have low porosity and if it sinks, it is high porosity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjOsKWZi-rc

I hope this guide to hair porosity for natural hair helps you better understand your hair type. Our store is full of hair butter, conditioners and more hair products you can shop for according to your hair type.

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