Dry & Damaged Hair · Guide
Apply to clean, damp hair from the ears down, use a coin-sized amount for shoulder-length hair, comb it through, and leave it five to fifteen minutes. Heat helps low-porosity hair and does little for anything else.
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Shampoo first. A mask applied over the residue of the last week has to get through that residue before it reaches your hair, and it mostly does not.
Then squeeze the water out. Hair that is dripping dilutes the mask and the product runs straight off. Squeeze firmly with your hands, or blot with a towel — blot rather than rub, because rubbing wet hair with a terry towel roughs up the cuticle and is a meaningful source of frizz on textured hair.
A coin-sized amount for shoulder-length hair; a golf ball for long, thick or coily hair. Most people under-apply on thick hair and over-apply on fine hair.
Start at the ends and work up, and stop at about ear level. The ends are the oldest, most damaged part of your hair and need the most; the roots are the newest and need none. Mask at the roots is the main reason people report a mask making their hair greasy.
Then comb it through with a wide-tooth comb. This is the step everyone skips and it does two things at once: it distributes the product evenly instead of leaving it in clumps, and it detangles at the moment your hair has the most slip and is therefore least likely to break. The AAD makes the same point about wide-tooth combs on wet hair (AAD, everyday hair care).
Five to fifteen minutes, or whatever the label says. The great majority of the benefit lands early; the curve flattens fast after ten minutes.
Overnight masking is popular and largely pointless for moisture masks, and actively counterproductive for protein or bond treatments — extended protein exposure is one of the routes to stiff, brittle hair. If a label gives a specific time on a protein-leaning product, that number is there for a reason.
It depends entirely on your porosity, which is why the advice you read contradicts itself.
Low-porosity hair has a tightly packed cuticle that resists letting anything in — this is a measurable physical property of the fiber (true porosity measurement of hair, PubMed). Gentle warmth helps the cuticle lift enough for the mask to penetrate. A shower cap plus the ambient heat of the bathroom is enough; a warm (not hot) towel over the cap is better.
High-porosity hair already has a raised cuticle. There is nothing to open, and heat makes little difference. Not sure which you are? The porosity test takes five minutes.
Rinse thoroughly with lukewarm water. Under-rinsing is a real cause of limp, coated hair — if your hair feels slightly waxy when dry, rinse longer next time.
The final cold rinse is the most repeated tip in hair care and the effect is modest: cold water does encourage the cuticle to lie flatter, which marginally improves shine, but it is a small finishing touch rather than the thing that decides your result. Do it if you can stand it. Do not feel you have failed if you cannot.
From the picks
A moisture mask for dry hair, the drugstore version of the same idea, and a strength mask for colored hair. Use one weekly, not all three.
Best weekly mask
The straightforward weekly deep conditioner, built on oils and B-vitamins rather than a patented bond active. When hair is thirsty rather than structurally broken, this is the honest answer.
The drugstore mask
A one-to-three minute deep conditioner from the drugstore shelf. It is a moisture treatment rather than a repair treatment, and at this price that is a perfectly good trade.
Best for bleached lengths
A rinse-out repair mask aimed squarely at chemically treated hair, and one of the few that does conditioning and strengthening in one pass rather than asking for two products.
Weekly for dry, coarse, curly or chemically treated hair. Every two weeks for hair that is doing fine. Fine, straight, untreated hair often does not need a mask at all and is better served by a light leave-in.
We have not used these products ourselves. They are chosen from what is in the formula, what those ingredients are documented to do, and whether that matches the problem this page is about — and every product below links to the manufacturer's own page so you can check the formulation claims yourself. The full method is here.
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Claims about what an ingredient does are cited to dermatology bodies or published research. Claims about what a product contains are cited to the manufacturer's own page and labeled as the manufacturer's claim. Where the evidence is thin, we say so on the page rather than rounding it up. Read the full method.