How to Clean Your Hair Brushes Properly

The whole point of washing your hair, is to clean it. What's the point if you hair brush is dirty? Hair brushes can get really dirty, even if your hair isn't dirty. The build up of hair spray, gels, and other hairstyling products leave residue on hair brush bristles. So just when you think you have washed your hair, you are actually brushing dirt and build up back into your hair strands. There are simple ways to clean your hair brush without much effort. Try a few of these and make sure your hair stays squeaky clean as well as your styling products for the best hair possible!

Pick out the excess hair first. Grab a wide-tooth comb and comb through your hair brush to get rid of the extra hair out. This will get rid of stray hairs, nasty dandruff and extra dead skin lying around on the hair brush bed.

BRISTLE BRUSHES - A.K.A - DRY HAIR BRUSH:
Wash your hair brush in the sink with warm water and shampoo. Add about a tablespoon of your favorite shampoo and run a sink full of warm water.

Use a wide-tooth comb or old tooth brush to gentle scrub the bristles and base of your brush. Let it soak for about 30 minutes. Let it air dry.

This is the simplest and easy way to wash out your dirty brushes. Make sure your handle is plastic or rubber first. If it's wood, letting it soak in water will warp it.

PLASTIC BRISTLE BRUSHES - A.K.A - WET HAIR BRUSH:

There are many ways to clean plastic bristles since they don't hard as much dirty as easily. Soak it the sink with a mixture of one part ammonia to four parts water or a solution of one part vinegar to four parts water.

Use warm water, if you don’t want to put vinegar or ammonia in your sink, you can soak your brush in a bucket or other portable container.

Let your brush soak in the solution for about 10 minutes. After it's done soaking, rinse it off with warm water. You don’t want the vinegar or ammonia ending up in your hair.

Photo courtesy of  -- down---to---earth.blogspot.com

Make Your Hair Shine with A Beer Hair Rinse - For Dull Hair

A lot of times, hair gets dull overtime, especially if you color your hair. After awhile hair becomes weighed down with gunk from shampoo and conditioners as well as styling products. This is why every woman should consider going more organic-ish with their hair care and with their entire beauty routine. However, many women don't have the time and/or the  money to concentrate on switching up every beauty and hair care product to more natural replacement -- this is why this Beer Hair Rinse is so great!

Beer Hair Rinse may sound a bit funny, but it truly takes away all the gunk and helps your hair shine with all it's might. You don't need too much to make this beer hair rinse, just a few supplies. Granted, this beer rinse doesn't smell the best -- you can add your own favorite essential oils to help make the smell not so bad.

Things you will need:

• 1 oz distilled rain water (catch rain water if needed)
• 2 teaspoons apple cider vinegar
• 7 - 10 drops of lemon essential oil (recommended but can use another scent) Just to make the rinse smell better.
• 1 ounce beer (stale works fine)
• 5 drops calendula essential oil (optional -- needed for blondes)

All you really need to do is mix up this Beer Hair Rinse recipe minutes before you take a shower. I would recommend NOT bathing and washing your hair, as some women do. You want to make sure you can rinse off fast and easily. Go ahead and shampoo and condition as normal and then add in the Beer Hair rinse as the final touch. Let it sit in your hair for about 5 minutes. This gives you ladies time to shave and what not in the shower.

Rinse the beer rinse out and style as normal. Hope you enjoy!

Homemade Lemon Spray For Fine Hair

Are you tired of having fine limp hair that won't hold any volume? Yeah, a lot of people are! And of course, not many people want to buy expensive hair products that promise results of fluffy beautiful hair, especially when those products just damage hair even more. In reality you can get the same results as big brand hair products without the cost and without the damage.

This recipe only calls for lemons and water, pretty easy right? Yes, it is! The lemon in the mixture helps give volume to your hair while the water helps moisturize the hair at the same time.  While hairsprays have alcohol in them, this hair care recipe is completely orgranic. The lemons work much like alcohol without actually drying out hair half as much.

You will need:

1 Lemon squeezed
2 Cups of water

You want to start off by cutting up the lemon in a bowl so that you don't lose any of the juice. Slice up the lemon into 4 pieces.

Next you will want to add 4 cups of water into a boiling pan, and start boiling the water until it bubbles. Add the four slices of lemon into the boiling pot. Let this mixture boil until half in gone. You can just wing it and eyeball it. Once the 4 cups of water looks about like two, turn the stove off and let it simmer.

Let that simmer for about 5 to 7 minutes. Just long enough to cool down enough to strain the mixture into another bowl. This way you get all the lemon slices and skin out of the way. You don't want that in your hair, do you? No!

Let the lemon water cool down. Add this lemon water mixture into an empty spray bottle (a jar will work just fine.) You don't really need it, but the mixture should be applied to hair evenly.

When you start to apply the mixture to your hair, make sure that your hair is wet. I have tried this before with dry hair -- it is awkward. Let your wet hair soak up the lemon juice and water and dry naturally or style immediately after adding.

The only side effect of this mixture is that the lemon juice *might* lighten the hair slightly if your in the sun a lot. The shelf life of this hair recipe is about a month, and you can always cook up some batch instantly!

Cucumber Hair Mask (Dry and Damaged Hair)

If you are a swimmer or just enjoy the luxury of lounging in the pool way too often, you might have noticed that your bathing suit and skin take a hit from the chlorine. All too often your skin seems too dry and your bathing suit is starting to fade. Right? Well, the same thing happens to your hair. Chlorine damage can cause your hair to become dry and brittle and eventually this leads to breakage and dryness. Chlorine can also damaged your hair's color, whether it be a natural color or dyed hair.

A great homemade hair care solution to this problem is a Cucumber Hair Mask. The Cucumber will help give moisture to your hair while the other ingredients will strengthen the hair to prevent any further damage. This homemade beauty hair care recipe is virtually free, as most people just have this stuff laying around the house.

You will need:

• 1 egg
• 2  teaspoons of olive oil
• 2 cups of a peeled cucumber (about 1-2 medium size cucumbers)

First of all, make you have all the needed ingredients. If not, you can purchase these items very cheaply at your local grocery store. Once you have all the ingredients, go ahead and do the prep work. Peel two cucumbers and slice them up, and then blend them well in a blender or food processor.

You will then need to measure out 2 teaspoons of olive oil and grab 1 medium to large size egg out of the fridge. Blend up the cucumber, olive oil and egg into a bowl. There really is no need to blend in a blender or anything. You can use a fork or spoon to beat the mixture until it's blended together.

Go ahead and add the mixture to your hair. It's better to add to dry hair rather than wet hair. Why? Because the dry hair will absorb the mixture better than wet hair will. You can make sure your hair gets all the ingredients full force instead of the water diluting it.

Leave this cucumber hair mask on for about 10 minutes and then shampoo and condition as normal. It's best to use this treatment once or twice a month until you see improvement.