What Is Hair Porosity?

Hair porosity explains your hair's reaction to moisture and Its capacity to accept or retain water. A significant factor in determining porosity is the structure of the outer layer of your hair. Low porosity hair has a compact cuticle layer, making it difficult for moisture to penetrate or escape. In contrast, high porosity hair has a loose cuticle layer making it easy for water to penetrate and escape. Medium or normal hair porosity has its cuticles not too close and not too sparse hence it allows easy penetration and retention of water.

Why hair porosity so important?

Becoming aware of your hair's ability to retain or lose moisture enables you to treat and manage your hair well with the right ingredients and products. Knowing how porous your hair is also enables you to decide what styling or hair habits work best for you and how you can keep your hair healthy.

Puffs Essentials Products are specially formulated to work on all hair types, no matter the porosity, Our Coconut Almond Leave-in Conditioner for example, is chalk filled with ingredients such as vegetable glycerin, avocado oil, babassu oil, grapeseed oil, and more. These ingredients are essential as they add moisture to all hair while balancing the pH level and protecting the cuticles to preserve the strength and health of the hair.

How to discover your Hair's Porosity 

Do you find that products often sit on top of your hair? Do you find that your hair takes forever to air dry on wash day? If you answered yes, your hair has low porosity, but if products absorb well in your hair and dry off fast, your hair has high porosity.

Another test to check your hair porosity is to drop a mass of your hair into water. You need to wait 2-4 minutes In order to get accurate results. Also, this test needs to be done on clean, freshly washed hair because products in your hair can affect this test. We recommend our Tingling Clarifying Shampoo Bar to do so!

If the hair floats, your hair has low porosity. If your hair sinks gradually, it has medium porosity; however, if it sinks immediately, you have highly porous hair.

Sliding your finger over a strand of your hair can also indicate how porous it is. If the feel is rough, your hair is highly porous; if smooth, it has low porosity.

Caring for Each kind of Porous hair 

Now that you know the state of your hair you can decide how to care for it, What products to style it with, and how you can keep your curls hydrated and moisturized. 

If you have low porous hair, heating it may increase its ability to retain moisture. Low porous hair does not accept moisture easily because there is hardly any space between its cuticles, although once it absorbs moisture it typically retains it rather well. Heating your hair during treatments such as deep conditioning, and oiling can help improve hair with this porosity.

For normal or medium porosity hair, the hair cuticles are looser and not too close; this enables moisture to penetrate the hair with ease but it is also more prone to not retaining it and drying out. Conditioning and using a sealant oil like our Simple sealant helps to  retain and replace lost moisture.

For high porosity hair treating it with minimal heat can help improve this hair type. It is especially important for Individuals with high  porosity hair to remember to use their bonnets at night and avoid materials like cotton, which can draw moisture out.

On rare occasions, your hair might have different porosity levels to varying portions on your head. In this case, you can continue trying other treatments and suggestions on how to care for different hair porosity types until you discover which one works best.