Hair Swelling in Water
This subject came up recently on the Wavy Hair Community and I wanted to do a little research to find out how much water is too much - and for how long. ©Science-y Hair Blog 2013 Hair does not take on water immediately, it is designed to repel water in it's unaltered state. Whenever I put hairs in water to photograph them, they do not swell dramatically to the point at which the cuticles are standing up and things look awful. The measurements you'll read about below are tiny. Your hair is probably more protected than the hair cited below by things like conditioner, hair gel and maybe oils - including those that protect your hair naturally. There are 2 ways to get hair to swell with water - expose it to high relative humidity and soak it in water. When hair begins to swell with water, the swelling is initially distributed along the length of the hair and hair can actually increase in length (temporarily) as a result. But not very much. Think of the pressure exerted on a garden h...