Exactly How to Keep Your Long Hair from Looking Mangy

Monthly

Clarifying Treatment
While your day-to-day shampoo is pretty good at removing styling ingredients, some things don’t easily dissolve with normal cleansing, like special polymers that help thwart humidity. To remove these kinds of ingredients, you need a shampoo with added muscle: Clarifying formulas contain higher levels of surfactants that are able to take off clingy silicone, fatty alcohols, and oily residue left behind, explains Schueller; be sure to rub it over lengths, not just at roots. If you dye your hair, choose a product that’s color-safe, such as Pantene Purifying Shampoo ($5, pantene.com), which is infused with fade-resisting antioxidants, or Oribe The Cleanse Clarifying Shampoo ($44, oribe.com), which contains volcanic ash to wipe out product accumulation without stripping dye molecules.

RELATED: 9 Things Girls with Long Hair Do But Will Never Admit To 

Weekly

Hair Vinegar
Picture a chalky, calcified showerhead. The same thing can happen to your own head over time if you don’t nix the hard-water minerals that glom on to lengths. One thing that works? Rinsing with apple cider vinegar, which lowers the pH of the mineral buildup enough to break it apart. But who wants their hair to smell like an egg dye kit? New products offer the benefits with a more sophisticated scent—Christophe Robin Purifying Hair Finish Lotion ($47, beautyhabit.com), for instance, uses a not-at-all-sour-smelling sage vinegar as its acidic agent. Once a week, spritz it onto dry hair from roots to tips and run your fingers through strands to distribute.

For tips on caring for your scalp and ends, pick up the November issue of Women’s Health, on newsstands now.