why is my hair suddenly dry and tangled? (European edition)

December 19, 2024 6:31 AM

50s woman with long blonde hair moved back to Europe a year ago, and find myself with massive tangles, particularly in the lower part of my hair close to my neck. Any idea why or how to fix?

First-- I live in the Netherlands. By no stretch of the imagination can this be called dry air. And while cold, it is not below freezing.

I was living in Indonesia before this where my hair was happy and healthy. It had more body there in general, so there are more differences than just the knots.

I get it trimmed regularly, and my hairdresser says there are not too many split ends. My hair still seems generally healthy-- aside from the knots which seem to form after washing. I have tried many different conditioners in the last two months and it seems to make no real difference. By the end of the day, the hair on the underside of my hair is a mare's nest. I have never had any real problem with knots in my hair before, FWIW.

I would have thought Indonesia would have been much worse for my hair since I was regularly in sun and salt water, but it really really seems to hate the Netherlands. Any advice or ideas gratefully accepted.

Oh, and the blonde is natural if that makes a difference. I don't have any grey so far. This is a family trait not to go grey until well into our 60s.

posted by frumiousb to Clothing, Beauty, & Fashion (18 answers total)

Best answer: Do you have friction between the the collars of your shirts and sweaters and the hair at your nape? (Happens to me with higher necks, wool sweaters, polarfleece, etc. but not with summer clothing.) Or different jewelry?

Or do you have harder water than in your previous location?
posted by fountainofdoubt at 6:49 AM on December 19, 2024 [7 favorites]

I have to use different shampoo/conditioner in different locations, and it takes a bit of experimenting to figure it out. I assume it’s a combination of the hard/soft water and relative humidity.

In addition to the clothing question, are you commuting with a different bag? Some combo of straps/coat are murder on my hair when it’s long
posted by chocotaco at 7:14 AM on December 19, 2024 [1 favorite]

Are you wearing a coat and/or scarf? I find that that part of my hair tangles terribly all winter because I am wearing a coat and scarf regularly.
posted by phlox at 7:22 AM on December 19, 2024 [4 favorites]

My hair is thinning so it does this. The actual strands are thinner than they used to be.
posted by beccaj at 7:27 AM on December 19, 2024 [1 favorite]

Best answer: My hair changes based on where I am living and it's probably just that the climate in the Netherlands is different than the one in Indonesia. It makes quite a difference and can change your hair forever. It's probably that you have curl in the under part of your hair that was awoken when you lived in Indonesia and is now mad at you because it's not as warm and humid as it was in Indonesia and also has less daylight and sunlight (which contributes to healthier hair due to Vitamin D . The curliest part of my hair is also that part at the nape of my neck and it also tangles more easily when I'm not nice to it.

For the dryness, I recommend hair oiling. It should cut down on the dryness and make it so it snags less because it'll have a smoother surface overall. It also never hurts to take vitamin D and use a sun lamp when you live in the north and in a place with grey winters.
posted by urbanlenny at 7:29 AM on December 19, 2024 [2 favorites]

When I lived in Amsterdam the water was so, so hard. Like, giant flakes of calcified stuff in the bottom of the shower that regularly clogged the drain hard. My guess is your hair hates it.
posted by Lawn Beaver at 7:36 AM on December 19, 2024 [8 favorites]

Best answer: I also lived in the Netherlands (way before I had other hormonal / medical issues impacting my hair!) and it didn’t do wonders for my hair. I attribute it to dry indoor air*, the hard water that lawn beaver mentioned, as well as I personally found that Dutch hair products didn’t suit me as well as American ones (YMMV of course).

*I happen to be a nerd about indoor air quality for Reasons, I have sensors in all my rooms and bring them with me when I travel, and you may be surprised how dry it can be inside even in the climate seems permanently damp outside. I have found that my hair is happiest when indoor a humidity is about 55-65%, which is way higher than most (normally insulated) homes have in winter unless massive humidifier interventions are staged. I would say cold weather, indoor averages I’ve seen lately are about 20-35% humidity - I can’t recall exact #s from my time NL but they def weren’t 60% in winter, even when wet outside.

Also I have a neckline such that my hair ends quite a bit further down my neck than I see on most other people. For a while, I did a subtle undercut of about 1-2” to bring the neckline up, and it was hardly noticeable unless I had my hair up in a ponytail, and it DEFINITELY helped with the neckline tangles.

Also make sure your thyroid levels are OK. Hypothyroidism symptoms can include brittleness, breakage and loss.

ETA: I do also change my hair routine in the winter, I use a pretty hefty hair cream (exact product is Redken ) immediately after I get out of the shower I liberally coat all hair other than the immediate 2” by the scalp and otherwise due everything as normal, it helps a LOT. I have found this to be most effective immediately after the shower, seems to lock in moisture better and avoid the greasy look I get if I apply it when my hair is mostly dry.
posted by seemoorglass at 8:00 AM on December 19, 2024 [3 favorites]

I had this problem in the winter (in Boston) when I had long hair, from scarves wrapped around my neck. Snarl City! I used John Paul Mitchell's the Detangler leave-in conditioner and it worked well. I know JPM is available at salons in a lot of countries, though not sure about the Netherlands.
posted by pangolin party at 8:17 AM on December 19, 2024 [1 favorite]

High levels of calcium in the water will 100% do this. The hair at the nape of the neck is naturally more frizzy in many people so that would contribute to the problem. And then also you are at the stage of life where you may have more grays coming in (although I wouldn't think they would come in first by your neck, but who knows), and gray hair is way more coarse and snaggy than pigmented hair. I have been dealing with all of these problems so my sympathies!
posted by HotToddy at 8:56 AM on December 19, 2024 [1 favorite]

Different pillow may also be the problem, depending how you lay your hair at night.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 8:56 AM on December 19, 2024 [1 favorite]

There's a certain length of my hair that does this, but I do also advocate a filtering shower head and being mindful of winter clothing friction.

I should note, though, that during peri my hair texture went completely haywire - and was in fact a lot like both hay and wire - and then once it was over it went back to nearly the same as before, but I still had to grow out the bad texture (actually, I gave up eventually, I pixied it and started from there).
posted by Lyn Never at 9:21 AM on December 19, 2024 [1 favorite]

Cold air holds less water than warm air. Relative humidity is relative to air temperature, so cold air is drier than warm air at the same relative humidity.

Compare the dewpoint of the netherlands to Indonesia - right now the dewpoint of a random place in the Netherlands is 2.2c, while in Indonesia it is 24C. That means you have to cool the air in the Netherlands to 2C to reach 100% relative humidity (completely saturated). While in Indonesia you would have completely saturated air at 24C. Because there is, in absolute terms, more moisture in the air in Indonesia.

The other factors mentioned here - hard water, friction from scarves and sweaters, different hair products - definitely play a factor. But I think upping your hair *hydration* will also help.
posted by muddgirl at 9:30 AM on December 19, 2024 [2 favorites]

100% what others are saying about hard water. But my hair likes hard water--it curls in my native TX and acts dumb in Connecticut.
posted by 8603 at 10:01 AM on December 19, 2024 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Could be hard water—that did a number on my hair when I temporarily moved somewhere with significantly harder water than I had experienced before or since.

Echoing what Lyn Never said about perimenopause. My hair is quite different now than it was pre-peri-menopause, much drier and prone to tangling.

I also had terrible tangles and straw like dryness when I used products with protein, which apparently builds up on my hair and makes it unhappy and dry. I have to be careful what shampoos and particularly conditioners I use.

I had serious iron deficiency for a while and it caused my hair to be dry and fall out and get tangled a lot.

I now keep it manageable by making sure my iron/ferritin levels are good and using a conditioner with amodimethicone, which I learned doesn’t build up the same way as other silicones. Here is a scientific explanation.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 4:42 PM on December 19, 2024 [1 favorite]

This happened to me.


It was the high collar on my winter coat. Rubbing my hair. A lot.
posted by amtho at 9:29 PM on December 19, 2024 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Some really good answers here. Thank you! I’m through menopause already— my hair got curlier in that process! But some good other things to check and consider.
posted by frumiousb at 10:18 PM on December 19, 2024

I'm laying money on the problem being harder water than you are used to.

I moved to Paris in February and after a few weeks noticed that my hair was basically turning into straw because it was so dry. I was also losing a ton of hair which freaked me out even more. My sister suggested it was hard water. I didn't think that was the problem at first as I had spent a few months living at her house in Wisconsin while I was waiting for my visa. But once I corrected for the hard water my hair is pretty much back to normal. And I have noticed the issue in both Netherlands and in Prague / Budapest when I traveled without my now-normal haircare / skincare products as those places have hard water too.

My hard water routines look like this: we found a filter for our shower head that combats the hard water. I can't remember which one we ended up with, but I know Philips makes one that you should be able to find there. The filter gets changed every six months.

I wash my hair with a hydrating shampoo during the week. One day on the weekend, I use a purifying shampoo that is designed to rinse the buildup from the hard water from my hair. I use Christoph Robin (Hydrating Shampoo, Hydrating Conditioner, and Purifying Shampoo) but I was told that any anticalcaire / anti-hardwater shampoo that you use once a week will work. I talked to a local Parisian pharmacy about it, and also went into Sephora and talked to them about what to get.

The other thing I do is after I shower, I towel off then spray my face and neck with Eau Thermal and then wipe it off before I put moisturizer on. There are all sorts that you can get and they are pretty inexpensive - a spray can of it lasts several months for me. I use Avene but I have used BioDerm and even Evian in the past, I think they are all the same thing. I thought the whole Eau Thermal thing was bullshit when my sister gave me some when I was living in Portland, but I swear by it here. My face does not look grey anymore, it's back to normal.

Hope any of this is helpful. It was frustrating to figure out when I was losing hair and my face was grey!
posted by ugf at 3:57 AM on December 20, 2024

How I solved the coat collar-hair tangle issue: before putting on my coat, covered head with massive scarf. If I wanted to, after the coat was buttoned up, I could pull the scarf backwards to expose my head, but keeping the scarf in place between my coat collar and my head.
posted by amtho at 10:56 PM on December 21, 2024