Hair Care Tips for Colored and Naturally Red Hair

Red hair is just beautiful. It's really no surprise why poets and painters have tried to capture the beauty of red hair with their words or their canvasses since time immemorial. Fiery titian locks evoke images of dancing flames, of sunrises and sunsets, of energy and passion.

If you have red tresses, it's only right that you celebrate the glorious color of your hair. And because red hair is special, you should also take especially good care of it to keep healthy, manageable and vibrant. Here are hair care tips that can help you maintain the beauty of your ginger mane.

Never go out under direct sunlight without any covering for your head. Exposure to direct sunlight is bad enough as it is because it can cause heatstroke and dehydration. It can also cause your hair to dry, and if your hair is ginger-colored, the beautiful color of your tresses can fade as well. Whether natural or applied, red pigments are vulnerable to sunlight and can wash out very easily.

Natural red hair is also naturally coarse and prone to drying, splitting and breakage. To prevent this kind of damage to your ginger strands, it's important that you feed your locks with moisture regularly and generously. So, be lavish with conditioning your tresses. Wash your hair with conditioner every day and coat it with leave-on conditioner or hair serum. Every week, pamper your mane with deep conditioning. You should also shampoo less often - no more than once a week - to allow your strands' natural oils to do their work in nourishing and protecting your mane.

As much as possible, use products appropriate to your ginger hair. There may not be a lot of hair care products available that specifically cater to redheads, given that there are only so few natural redheads out there. But a thorough Internet search will yield some good results and lead you to great products for your fiery tresses. If you're not a natural redhead, you should use hair care products particularly designed for colored hair.

If you feel that you need to enhance the red highlights of your hair, you can rinse it with cranberry juice after washing it. Cranberry juice is very effective in bringing out the red in hair. Just be careful not to stain your clothes, your towels or any important household linen with cranberry juice, however.

Always be gentle when handling your ginger hair. Red tresses are naturally fragile. So, make it a point to be careful when dealing with your hair. Avoid yanking or tugging at it so its strands won't snap off. Additionally, try to minimize styling it with heat-based styling tools. Red hair doesn't take heat too well and so should be protected from it. If you have to blow-dry or iron your hair, make sure your tresses are coated with leave-on conditioner first.

Red hair is beautiful hair. Rather than scorning the brightness of your titian locks, you should embrace it. Celebrate your ginger hair by caring for it the way it needs to be cared for all the time.

How Elizabeth I made red hair fashionable – in 1558

There’s a painting in the National Portrait Gallery that has long been a source of fashion inspiration for me; it dates from about 1575, and is a peerless image of redheaded chic. Elizabeth I wears a gown of white and gold satin with dashing scarlet frogging across the breast, like a hussar, and she holds a particularly wonderful feather fan – whites and sulphurous yellows, dark iridescent greens, oranges and russet reds. That ghostly face is turned three-quarters of the way toward us; her expression reserved; her lips compressed. The line of that nose – “rising somewhat in the midst”, as Sir John Hayward described it – is clearly shown. My nose does the same. My hair is also red. Elizabeth I has been my pin-up girl since I was tiny. But it was only when I began researching my book Red: A Natural History of the Redhead that I came to appreciate how revolutionary Elizabeth’s image-making truly was.

Elizabeth’s red hair was no accident. For most of her life, Elizabeth wore wigs, so she might have chosen hair of any colour she liked, but she chose red; she was so committed to the shade that she is even supposed to have dyed the tails of her horses to match. (Who says redheads don’t have a sense of humour?)

Nor was she following the crowd – far from it. The astonishing thing is that Elizabeth chose a hair colour that had typified the barbarian for centuries, since the time of the ancient Greeks and their encounters with the tribes living around the Black Sea. Its predisposition, as a recessive gene, of cropping up in the endogamous Orthodox Jewish community led to it becoming the hair colour chosen in much European art for the arch-traitor, Judas, too. No surprise, therefore, that it was also used to stigmatise Tudor England’s own barbarian and potentially traitorous “other” – the Irish and the Scots. So powerful a piece of conditioning was this that in Elizabethan literature you find red hair cited as positive proof that the clans of Ireland and Scotland (along with any other untrustworthy Johnny Foreigner you might care to include), were directly descended from the “barbarous Scythians”, a tribe living around the Black Sea 3,000 years ago, mentioned in King Lear.

It seems strange for a monarch to link herself visually with the very subjects who had most to gain should she lose her throne. But there were personal reasons behind Elizabeth’s choice. Displaying the red hair inherited from her father gave the lie to all those rumours of illegitimacy that had plagued her girlhood. There were public and political reasons too.

Red hair has always been other. It stands apart. The white skin that so often goes with it also spoke in Elizabeth’s image-making of her separateness, her status as the Virgin Queen. Red and white were also the colours of St George, England’s patron saint. Those courtiers who dyed their hair or their beards red, to follow Elizabeth’s lead, were not merely declaring their loyalty to the queen; they and she were also, I believe, making a statement of standing apart, in Protestant England, from dark-haired and less pale-skinned Catholic Europe. Red and white were the Elizabethan brand, if you like, and that brand has been one of the most successful in history, as recognisable now as it would have been in Elizabeth’s own day.

This taking of a stereotype and turning it on its head, this classic piece of reverse discrimination, strikes me as startlingly modern, and mirrors the way many redheads are dispatching prejudice today. Gloriana was a superbly clever propagandist without question, but perhaps you have to be a redhead to appreciate what a perfect piece of sleight-of-hand her image-making truly was.

Introducing the 'roadtrip' – fashion's brave new haircut

Forget Kate Middleton’s choppy bangs. A pair of nail scissors might be this season’s secret accessory: the hacked off fringe – a style we’re dubbing the road trip – is the haircut to have. Expensive salon treatments and My Little Pony colours are so over. Those nail scissors, and an Edward Scissorhands-like sense of abandon, are all you need.

Lady Gaga debuted her new fringe earlier this month – and had that halfway-up-the-forehead look that smacks of cutting it in the wing mirror, and – to all those who have seen Chappie – the girl from Die Antwoord, Yolandi. This caused the South African band to react angrily on Instagram, calling Gaga a “parasite” no less.

The road-trip fringe could be seen on, ahem, other “parasites” at the London shows last week. Sure, Edie Campbell’s shaggy number and Mica Arganaraz’s 80s curls are all very covetable, but they look like they require some kind of maintanence, and possibly a hairdryer. Far better the road-trip fringe, as seen at Christopher Kane, where most of the models wore fringes, and on Irina Kravchenko, at Margaret Howell.

Of course, while Yolandi is the poster girl of the road-trip fringe in 2015, even she would have to admit that there are precedents for nail-scissor haircuts. Most notably, these come from the 90s – the decade that everyone is trying to out-nerd each other on at the moment. See Emma Balfour’s long crop with mismatched lengths, Karen Elson as “fashion’s hottest property” on the cover of The Face in 1997, and Juliette Lewis’s various haircuts in 1994’s Natural Born Killers. Since that film actually involves a road trip of sorts, she probably wins – even 21 years later. Yolandi, though, can claim to take her nail-scissor work to new heights, with the front so short it’s almost cropped. Her haircut could be dubbed the high-speed road trip, perhaps. We’ll have to wait and see if others can keep up.