If you’ve ever noticed a lot of breakage, especially around your face, like me - you might start wondering what you can do to help remediate the issue. The reason so many people notice the breakage around the face is because this is the area that is pulled, prodded, heated and styled since it surrounds the facial area and is most noticeable.

But there is more to it than that - it’s also the hair that is most exposed to the elements like constant UV exposure. Related: Protecting Your Face From Sun Exposure After Exfoliation.  It’s not tucked away safely under top layers of hair. For whatever reasons, it seems the face-framing hair also tends to grey much faster, and the unfortunate side effect of greying is an increase in brittleness and decrease in overall elasticity. This has a lot of people wondering what they can do.

One of the options is to try what’s called a bond-building hair treatment. These can also go by other names. They can be called protein treatments, restructuring treatments, strengthening treatments, and restorative treatments.

For our purposes though, let’s talk about the treatments that specifically make the claim they can help rebuild the weakened bonds in the hair strand’s structure, and prevent breakage by helping to restructure those areas with new bonds.

Bond Building Hair Treatments

Bond builders seek to help fortify hair that has become very fragile due to any number of reasons. One of the most common is of course chemical treatments like coloring (especially bleaching, which actually breaks the hair structure down and makes it much more prone to damage) and other treatments like straightening or curling treatments.

The second most damaging to hair structure that many partake in is the use of heat styling tools like hair dryers, curling and straightening irons, rollers and other heat-activated treatments. Of course, you can help mitigate the damage done by heat by choosing products that use ceramic or ionic technology. You can also reduce the damage from heat by using various thermal protection sprays and creams. Related: Heat (Thermal) Protectants - Can They Shield Hair from Damage?

Bond builders are supposed to actually strengthen the hair by filling in the weak spots with various proteins or other bonding agents that literally help fill in the porousness caused by repeated assaults with chemicals and/or styling tools. They can help rebuild the integrity of the hair strands.

This type of damage can especially be seen on the layers of hair that are framing the face. This is because we focus most of our styling on the front, naturally. Plus (as previously mentioned) this hair is usually not protected from damaging elements like sunlight, so it really bears the brunt of all the damage and often needs the most TLC of any hair on your head.

Protein Treatments

Did you know that coconut oil is one of the best natural, non-chemical ways to help restore protein to the hair? We actually include this important oil in both our shampoo and conditioner for this reason. It’s an excellent way to help naturally fortify the hair’s structure and also help create that smooth surface that makes hair look so healthy.

Conventional protein treatments are aimed at doing a few things for the hair. Protein treatments are likely best suited to hair that has increased porosity for whatever reason. Most commonly, very porous hair is caused by excessive bleaching/lightening. Related: Coconut Oil in Skin and Hair Care

Porosity just indicates how “hole-y” the hair is, for lack of a better description. Think of how your skin has pores – you can see them as tiny pin pricks or breaks in the surface, the same happens to the hair, except unlike our skin, our hair does not need pores to “breathe” because our hair is actually not a living organism like our skin.

Increased porosity is a great indicator of appropriateness for a protein treatment. Proteins can certainly help to smooth over those pores as a temporary stop gap against the appearance of dryness and the tendency to really soke in humidity and expand (not in a good way).

Strengthening Treatments

Strengthening hair treatments usually aim to help strengthen the integrity of the hair, and fortify it against further damage by infusing it with various vitamins, oils and other nutrient-packed ingredients. They often overlap with bond building or protein treatments, because these are often the components of building strength in the hair strands.

These are best for hair that easily breaks, seems to never really grow past a certain point before breaking, and tends to snap easily if strained at all.