How Often Should You Wash Thinning Hair?

When you have thinning hair, everything about your hair care routine becomes something to give extra thought, including how often to shampoo. Believe it or not, you might be washing your hair too much and adding to the thinning.

How Does Shampooing Add to Hair Thinning?

When you wash your hair too often, the natural oils produced by the scalp don't have time to make their way to the bottom of each hair shaft. That means your hair will be drier and more brittle, leading to the potential for more breakage and thinning.

Coarser and curlier hair requires more time for the oil to travel from the scalp to the ends of the hair strands, so it may need to be shampooed less than fine hair.

Most experts agree that shampooing more than three or four times a week is too much, especially when you're battling thinning hair.

However, just rinsing the hair out with water or using a conditioning product on the ends may not lead to further thinning. Still, you should be careful that you don't break or damage your hair during the combing, drying, and styling phases.

Can You Shampoo Too Little?

Though you don't want to over-wash your hair, you don't want to under-wash it either. If you do, the oils on your scalp can build up too much and leave you prone to dandruff.

Additionally, some schools of thought indicate that the extra oil may block your scalp pores and trap DHT there. That's a hormone most related to male pattern baldness in men and some women. So if the hormone is sitting there, trapped in the follicle, it may have longer to cause more hair loss.

So, How Often Should You Wash Thinning Hair?

Unfortunately, the answer to how often you should wash your hair (in general as well as if it's thinning) is one without a black or white answer. In general, it's best to wash as often as necessary for your individual circumstances. People produce oil at different rates and have various hair types, so each person will need to wash at a different frequency to ensure their scalp is as healthy as possible—not too dry and not too greasy.