don't even think about doing this

I learned something very important yesterday which I will remember from this day, forth.  I hope to spare you some troubles by sharing it, if this is something you might ever be tempted to do.  You can skip to the important lesson below, or you can wade through this diatribe about bad hair first.

Setting the stage: I am having a bad hair life.  My hair is very fine, and it is a nondescript color--not brown, not blonde--with a nondescript texture--not straight, not wavy.  The things my hair is best at are: lying limply on my head, looking permanently uncombed, not holding a curl, and frizzing in the humidity.   In short, I've pretty much despised my hair each and every day of my life.  It has its moments, but they are fleeting.  Over the course of my life I've had every length of hair from "to the waist" when I was younger, to "super short pixie", which unfortunately happened about a year and a half ago. I'd gone shorter and shorter and into pixie zone for a couple of years, but when I got to super short pixie out of sheer frustration, I sort of freaked out and started growing it out again.  It's taken the whole year and a half to get back to something that feels like a deliberate style (or an attempted deliberate style), rather than a phase of growing it out.  I went through many painful stages to get here, including one in which my hair looked like George Michael at his Wham!-iest every day that I woke up.  That was a long, bad phase which did not inspire personal confidence.

I've been trying to be more accepting of my hair. I mean, it is what it is, and it's stupid and exhausting to obsess over it.  I've been trying to be very kind to my hair by taking some hair vitamins, using a shampoo with nothing bad in it (and not too often), and never failing to use a good conditioner.  [Ominous foreshadowing.]

One brief product endorsement and we're on to the important part, I promise. I found an awesome conditioner called Keratase.  It was so awesome I'd told people about this amazing conditioner.  It is supposed to be a deep conditioning product which you leave in for awhile, every so often, and then rinse it out.  But I found out that if I used a tiny smidge every time I washed my hair, and left it in, that my hair felt super shiny and soft.  I'd had my husband and a friend feel my hair because it was so soft and shiny and silky.  I was so happy.  It was like finding the holy grail of hair conditioners.  But then the last few weeks, I'd noticed that instead of being silky soft, my hair was back to dry and lifeless.  Maybe it was the highlights, I thought.  I'd been going to a different salon than I'd gone to for 20+ years because (insert long pointless story). The new person had gone overboard with the highlights.  I wasn't happy, and I thought she'd damaged my hair.  So I went back to the woman I'd gone to for 20+ years.  In the process of cutting and coloring my hair back to a less brassy and healthier version, I mentioned the great conditioner I'd found and how I was leaving it in. She gasped and said, "That explains it.  I don't think it's just the highlights."

Here is the lesson at last: Apparently one should NEVER leave in conditioners which are not meant to be leave-in conditioners.  You will actually dry out and damage your hair.  I'd been over-conditioning (for months) and leaving in a product which was crystalizing in my hair and wreaking total havoc. 

Don't over-condition!

postscript: As of yesterday, I am at a length and cut that seems somewhat doable. I'm feeling a ray of hope.