Hair Care 101; My Hair Story Part 7

We left off in Part 6, where I had gotten my first perm in 2005. My hair was still full and lovely UNTIL we moved from Alaska to Washington. In WA, we lived in a place that had well water (nothing wrong with that) BUT the water had very high levels of iron, it was even orange and would stain our toilet, sink and tub within a day. My daughter's hair even got an orange tint. My hair became very, very thin and so did my daughter's. At first I had thought it was my health because I had some severe health issues with my heart and liver in Alaska and upon arriving in WA that caused my hair to fall out in the front a little, as you can see below in the photo the bare patch in the front. However, seeing what it did to my daughter's hair too and reading about how heavy iron levels in your water damages your hair and its irreversible.....made me scared! So I started to wash my hair with distilled water and that was a task! I ended up going back to the shower head to wash my hair and watched my hair just get worse and worse and break off dramatically.

Now, my hair was already porous (after having a perm) so maybe had it been unprocessed, it would not have been effected as bad as it was. Nevertheless, we moved to another location that did not have high iron levels in the water! It seems like my hair would not grow at all even, my perm was about 2 years old but my growth was barely a few inches!



However, the damage had been done and I had lost SO MUCH length. My hair went from near my knees up to my backside (that's a lot of inches lost!) So what did I do? Stupid me, figured all was lost, so might as well get another perm. <---STUPID!!! I got this perm in March 2007. The perm was great and I didn't have much breakage at all with the perming process, although my hair really didn't need the extra processing!




You can't see the length fully, but you can tell it isn't as full toward the ends as it used to be before I got a perm and had the "iron water" experience. I started to use Garnier Fructis Color treated/permed Shampoo and Conditioner around this time and also used the Garnier Fructis leave-in conditioner every time!! In the beginning I was using some alcohol-free gels but eventually all I needed was leave-in conditioner and then I let my hair air-dry. NO HEAT!
I began to pray on my hair asking God to help me recover from the damage that I did to it and to make the hair grow in my "bare" spot in the front. And it did!!! I have more hair there now and my hair is getting better.

Here is a photo almost a year after my 2nd perm (I had red eyes in the photo, so I made them black with editing software......they aren't black in real life LOL, they are green lol). You can see that my hair had FINALLY started growing again! I had new growth and it grew in nice and black and lovely and silky just like old times lol.