Operation long hair

I always lose a lot of hair. There are always strands of it wrapped around the vacuum cleaner or on the carpet wherever I’ve been sitting or brushing my hair.  I lose A LOT when I wash it, but that’s to be expected (and my hairdresser’s said this several times) considering I generally only wash once every seven days.

A little while ago, after spending a painstaking amount of time gently combing out the post-shoot aftermath of a rad 60s beehive, I realised that my hair hasn’t really grown much in the past six months. I dropped my six-weekly trimming back to 12-weekly after I got back from Sydney Supanova, because I wanted my hair to be longer when I debuted my Mera costume. But on a trawl through my pictures, I don’t see much difference for the small amount of cuts I’ve had since then, and I have a sneaking suspicion that I’ve been cleaning a lot more hair from the drainpipes than usual lately. And then there are my breaky, thin fingernails…

My hair goes through stages of being really healthy and growing quickly, and being really breaky and growing ever-so-slowly. The last time it was as bad as it currently is, I was being diagnosed with thyroid problems. But I'm also coming out of a period where I’ve been pretty unwell with various viruses and my immune system is struggling to get up off the floor. I've had a recent check and my thyroid is a-ok am, so I figured this might be the time to try out some tips for getting my hair to grow and be healthy.

I asked a few Facebook and Instagram friends for tips, and I’m going to try and give most of them a go (with the exception of eating or making treatments out of things I’m allergic to, like bananas). I also started reading a bunch of articles with tips. Some seem legitimate, some seem ridiculous, but I’ll see how I go.

Here are some of the things I’m going to try 

Eating foods like:

• Almonds 
• Salmon 
• Yellow capsicum 
• Oysters 
• Eggs 
• Sunflower seeds 
• Sweet potato 
• Avocado
• Spinach
• Lentils 
• Blueberries
• Chicken

Some of these foods are already a regular part of my diet, but some I’m going to have to make a conscious effort to eat more often. For example, oysters! They’re yum, but usually as a starter at a fancy dinner, not something I’d regularly chow down on during the week. I guess I’m going to be making friends with my local fish monger!

Routines like:

• A weekly coconut oil scalp massage and treatment
• Hello Hair Hydrating treatment

And supplements like:

• Biotin
• Silica
• B-stress vitamins
• Giving my hair some style-free days where I don’t use clips, straighteners, irons or tease. 

It seems like a lot of advice has more to do with what you eat than how you treat your hair, which makes sense. There’s not a lot you can do for the health of your hair that’s already grown, but you can nurture future growth. Because the ends of my hair are damaged, I’ll be keeping my 12-weekly trims too.

For the sake of monitoring progress, here is my hair pre-operation ‘long hair.’

And also my nails which are conveniently (depending on how you look at it) all broken after a bad manicure: