Cowashing: Your New Bleached Hair Solution

If you’ve just recently bleached your hair, your new favourite word is going to become “cowashing”. It’s easy to look at someone with light coloured or bleached hair from a distance and admire their look but what you don’t know is the behind the scenes constant care of bleached hair. Perfect hair often doesn’t come easy, it requires the time and effort but cowashing is one of the many solutions to caring to your new look.

What is Cowashing

If you’ve recently just bleached your hair, or feel that it could do with a little extra care, shampoo is going to become your biggest enemy. As shampoo works to clean your hair from the roots, it can also easy cause further damage to your already sensitive hair, and completely change the colour of your hair. Although every girl with bleached hair knows to use purple shampoo to prevent brassiness, the product is often hard to use. Since there are so many issues with using shampoo, the solution is, why not use it at all? If you’re someone who needs to wash their hair on the regular, rather than risking the use of shampoo, just use conditioner! And that’s exactly all cowashing is! Washing with simply conditioner.

Why?

Before you freak out and faint from disgust, remind yourself of the implications of using shampoo. If you’re only sticking to conditioner, your hair is softer and smoother with every wash. Just like dry hair or curly hair, bleached hair doesn’t get as oily as natural hair. There isn’t as high of a risk of dandruff and oil. Furthermore, by just using conditioner, your showers become 2x faster and you encourage your hair to get used to it’s natural oils in order to heal faster.

Types of Conditioners To Use

Although you can easily just use any conditioner, by using the right conditioner you can prevent oiliness and filth gathering up in your hair post wash. However, the best thing you can do, is making sure your conditioner doesn’t contain any sulfates or silicones which can further dry out your hair. Furthermore, since you’re relying solely on conditioner, use double or whatever amount is enough to coat your hair. As you do so, washing it out will also rid your hair of dirt and grime.

Other Ways to Wash

With coloured or bleached hair, you really want to be washing as infrequently as possible in general in order to retain that colour. The best way to maintain this without walking around with a shiny head is to use dry shampoo. Dry shampoo is also going to become your new best friend next to conditioner. Spritzing dry shampoo in between washes can keep your hair fresh and voluminous. Try not to touch your hair often in general as the oils from your fingers introduce a world of oils to your hair. In order to spread out your washes even further, opt to tie it up or wear a hair tie to keep it neat!

Post Shower Haircare

Since your hair is going to be dry from the bleach, even with dry shampoo and conditioner, it doesn’t mean you’re necessarily healing it from inside. Steps you can take to return your hair to silkiness is to use leave-in conditioners or hair treatments. Aside from using leave-in conditioners post showers, you can also use it to replace your conditioner step on the days you are using shampoo. This can strengthen your hair even further. However, otherwise, if you are using it post-shower, you can easily leave it in til the next wash without any worry. On the other hand, remember that when using hair treatment, although you can use it for as long as possible, they must be washed out.