Guide
Do hair extensions damage your hair?
355 words
Hair extensions do not damage hair by themselves. Damage comes from three specific things: too much weight on too small a section, bonds left in past the refit date, and removal by pulling instead of dissolving or opening. All three are decisions made by the person fitting them.
Weight is the first cause
Every attachment hangs from a section of your own hair. If that section is too small for the weight it carries, the hair is under constant tension from the moment you leave. This is the mechanism behind traction alopecia, and it is why a good fitting uses fewer, better placed strands rather than as many as will fit.
Time is the second
Your hair grows about a centimetre a month. As the bond moves down, it starts to catch on the hair around it, and shed hair that would normally fall out gets trapped and matts at the bond. Six weeks past the refit date this is a tangle. Three months past, it is a problem that has to be cut out.
Removal is the third, and the biggest
Almost every photograph of extension damage online is a removal photograph. Tape and keratin bonds have to be chemically broken first. Rings have to be opened with pliers, not slid off. Wefts have to be unpicked. All of this takes over an hour for a full head, and a salon in a hurry will pull instead. That is how people lose hair.
How to tell yours are too heavy
A dull ache at the roots, especially in the first days, is not normal and does not settle. Neither is a headache when you tie your hair up, or visible pull marks at the parting. If any of those are happening, go back and have strands removed. A good salon will do this without argument, because they would rather remove ten strands than lose your hair.
The shedding that is not damage
When extensions come out you will see a frightening amount of hair. Most of it is not loss. You shed 50 to 100 hairs a day naturally, and while the bonds were in, a lot of those shed hairs were held in place rather than falling. Three months of normal shedding arriving at once looks like disaster and usually is not.