Teacher Hair Nightmare? This might just be the blog post for you!

As a bottle blonde with hair extensions, you may be fooled into believing that I put a lot of time and effort into my hair care. Honestly though, I am totally not down for high price, high maintenance hair care and you shouldn't have to be either.

True story: I wash my hair once, maybe twice a week and I have a grand total of three go-to hairstyles (down, plait or ponytail, that's about the height of it). It's a miracle that my extensions last as long as they do (my last set were still looking good after a year, the average is meant to be four to six months), but I am certainly not complaining. In reality, it's all down to some simple, tried and tested tips and products - none of which have financially crippled me (yet).

First things first, the one area in which I splurge a bit is on the shampoo and conditioner that I use. Having extensions, I just can't afford to put any old product on my hair and I will totally spend the time looking for a sulphate free shampoo that will extend the life of my tresses. I completely avoid budget brands like Pantene, Head & Shoulders, Herbal Essences and Tresemme, and would recommend that you do too. This is not because I'm being snobby, but because these budget brands in particular always leave my hair feeling like straw and my scalp feeling itchy and irritated. Let's face it, if a brand leaves every hairdresser I know gasping in disgust and horror, it's probably not a good product - they're the professionals here, heed their advice!

If you're a brunette or redhead, this paragraph might be a bit redundant, so feel free to skip on to the next one! Over the years, I have developed a fondness for two shampoo/conditioner brands. I no longer use it, but the Dumb Blonde in the Bed Head range by Tigi was my go-to shampoo for about eight years because their products smell absolutely fantastic (one ex-boyfriend used to hold me and sniff my hair a lot when I started using this shampoo; at the time it was cute, looking back it is definitely more on the creepy end of the spectrum). The only downsides of these products are the price, availability and toning capacity. This is an expensive salon brand, but neither are purple enough to eradicate brassy yellow tones without alternating the shampoo with another stronger product like the Pro:voke Touch of Silver shampoo (which I still love, but don't use as much). My current hair routine now includes the BlondeMe range by Schwarzkopf. It is quite expensive and is another salon brand, but it leaves my hair soft and shiny and the toning properties of this range are excellent. Interestingly, the first ever 'silver' shampoo I used (we're stretching back about 13 years here) was a Schwarzkopf product. I loved it back then and they're a brand that I definitely still have a lot of time for now.

Despite my shampoo and conditioner choices, I am absolutely no stranger to dry and damaged hair. Bleach does a lot of damage, but extensions make things A LOT more complicated because the oil produced to keep your hair healthy doesn't exist when the hair isn't attached at the follicle! To avoid looking like Russell Brand circa 2006, one thing I have dedicated myself to is hair oil. My current favourite is the Hask Argan Oil Repairing Shine oil, available from Superdrug for only £2.49. I put this on the ends of my hair most mornings and evenings, but a little goes a very long way and the 18ml lasts me over a month (except for that one time when I went away for the weekend and didn't put the cap on properly, so it oozed over my all of my other toiletries and some other items in my suitcase - the thought of it still makes me well up).

Another Hask miracle product is their Repairing Deep Conditioning Sachet. As I only use this on my ends once a week, one sachet lasts a couple of weeks, making this product really good value for money. The products smell amazing and leave my usually fine and frizzy hair looking and feeling smooth and silky. They were an absolute god-send on my honeymoon to Bali, where the humidity had me looking like I'd just happened upon an electric fence! On a secondary note, the link in this paragraph is for Boots, because, although the sachets are 50p cheaper in Superdrug, I bulk buy these when they're on Boots 3 for 2 offer (yes, exactly like one of those crazy people on those couponing / hoarding TV shows). At the time of writing, I have about 10 Hask sachets stockpiled in my bathroom cupboard, much to the annoyance of my hubby!

The third product is a new find. I'd read a lot of good reviews about the Macadamia brand, and my old hair salon used to stock it. However, at £19.99 for the next product, I was always put off by the price. At this point, fan-favourite TK Maxx swooped in, cape flapping in the breeze, and I recently acquired Macadamia's nourishing leave-in cream for less than £10 (YAY!) The bad news is that I couldn't find a TK Maxx link for this one (I think I was just really lucky to find it there), so the link above is for the full-price product at Look Fantastic. However, the good news is that if you've not used Look Fantastic before and click here before shopping, you can get £5 off if you spend £25 or more!

If you're going to spend time and effort conditioning your hair and using hair oil, it would be ill-advised to then fry your freshly conditioned hair with heated styling products. I don't my hairdryer or straighteners on a daily basis, but when I do use them, I always use some heat protection. The one I'm using at the moment is the Mark Hill Heat Protection Spray, which I actually got for free with my current hairdryer (it has like a million settings, a nice, long cord and I got it when it was on offer - yay!), but the heat protection spray is also available from Boots for less than £10. Mark Hill also do a really good anti-humidity finishing spray.

My final favourite product is Batiste dry shampoo and it is definitely tried and tested. I've used versions of this dry shampoo for over a decade - even during that embarrassing and ill-advised period in my early 20's where I went brunette and had an 'emo fringe'! Not for a lack of trying, I have not found anything that is even close to matching up. My current favourite is the Heavenly Volume dry shampoo, which is almost always included in Boots' in-store promotions. Even if my hair is freshly washed, I'll sometimes use this for it's impressive volumising effect.

My final tip is to help avoid horrible morning hair, and if you've ever woken up to a tangled mess of unruly hair that swallows hairbrushes, you might just value this simple trick: plait your hair before going to sleep. Before I got hair extensions, I often went to sleep with loose hair or threw it up into a messy bun, meaning that I used to spend a good five to ten minutes trying to rake a brush through my hair in the morning. However, since I've been following my care guide by spending a couple of minutes oiling and plaiting my hair in the evening, I have saved so. much. time. in the morning. I have far longer hair, but it takes me far less time to tame.

If you have any product recommendations or handy hair tips, please comment below - I'd love to know more. If you want to have a nosy at my hair inspiration (i.e. styles I love, but probably don't have the patience to actually do myself) on Pinterest, just click here.

Until next time,

E.E.