Why Does My Hair Change in Colorado? What Winter and Altitude Actually Do
Hello Lovelies,
Nikay here, and this one's for basically everyone this time of year, not just the ski and snowboard crowd. If you've walked to your car with damp hair in January, worn a wool hat on a dry day, or just spent real time outside in a Colorado winter, this applies to you.
Let's start with the obvious one: static. Our winters have been getting drier by the year, and dry air plus a wool hat, scarf, or sweater is a recipe for flyaways and shock-you static cling. Hair can't dissipate an electric charge the way it would if there were any real moisture in it, so every time that wool rubs against dry hair, the charge builds up and has nowhere to go. This is just physics, not bad luck.
Here's the one people don't think about: wet hair outside in the cold. Maybe it's snow that melted into your hair, maybe you just didn't fully dry it before you ran out the door, maybe you were out shoveling and it started snowing on you. Wet hair is already a lot weaker than dry hair — the moment hair gets wet, the bonds holding each strand together loosen up, which is why wet hair stretches so easily and doesn't snap back the way dry hair does. Now let that wet hair sit in freezing air, or actually freeze. Water expands as it turns to ice, and if that's happening inside strands that are already soaked through, it's putting real physical stress on the hair from the inside out. I don't have a stack of hair-specific research measuring exactly how much damage that does in one afternoon, but the physics is straightforward, and it matches what we see in the chair every winter: more breakage at the ends than dryness alone would explain.
Now stack an ordinary weekday morning on top of that. Nobody counts a car heater as heat styling, but it does the same kind of work. You shower, you run out of time, and you leave with hair that is not quite dry. You get into a car that has been sitting below freezing all night, and by the time you have backed out of the driveway the ends have gone stiff, or actually frozen. So you turn the heater on full and point it at your head, because that is what the heater is for. Count what just happened to that hair. It was wet, which is when it is weakest. Then it froze, which stressed it further. Then it took a blast of hot, dry air while it was at its most fragile. Three different climates in about ten minutes, and most of us do it every morning from November to March without thinking of it as anything at all. I am not going to put a number on what one commute costs you, because nobody has measured it. I am telling you it is the same kind of thing a hot tool asks of your hair, and none of us log it that way.
I am not going to tell you to stop warming up your car in January. The fix just has to happen in a different order. Dry your hair all the way before you open the front door, and if there is genuinely no time, dry the ends at least, since they are the part that freezes first and takes the heater head-on. Let the car warm up with the vents aimed at the windshield and your hands, not at you. Put your leave-in or oil on before the hat goes on, not once you get to work. The car heater is a blow dryer with one setting, high, and no diffuser. Treat it like one.
And if you do ski or ride, add one more layer on top of all this. We sit higher than almost anywhere else in the country, and thinner air means there’s less atmosphere up here to filter the sun before it reaches you — so your color is already taking more of it than it would almost anywhere else in America, even on cloudy days.
And while we’re here, let me correct something you’ll see repeated on a lot of hair blogs. You’ll read that UV goes up “8 to 10% for every 1,000 feet” of elevation. That number is wrong twice over. It comes from a 1997 study by Blumthaler and colleagues that measured UV between Innsbruck and the Jungfraujoch in the Alps — and that study reported per 1,000 metres, not per 1,000 feet. Worse, 8–9% is the figure for total sunlight and UVA; the number that actually matters for burning and for fading your color is erythemal — sunburn-effective — UV, and that one rises about 18% per 1,000 metres. Converted honestly, that’s roughly 5 to 6% per 1,000 feet. So the real effect is smaller per foot than the internet claims, but it’s the more damaging part of the spectrum, and it stacks up fast at our elevation. I’d rather give you the right number than the popular one. Snow reflects a huge amount of that UV back up at you too, the same reason people get sunburned in places they'd never expect on a ski trip. If you're blonde, red, or lightened, that pigment is the first thing to fade.
So here's the actual plan, whether you ski or just live here:
- A leave-in or oil before you head outside does double duty. It helps hold moisture in and protects against dry air, heat, and the wind and friction of a hat or scarf, and it gives static less to grab onto either way.
- Dry your hair all the way before you go out into the cold, and again before you head home if it got wet. Don't let it freeze wet, even just for a short walk or drive.
- A hat or helmet liner is smart for warmth, but remember it's also rubbing against your hair all day — the same leave-in habit above helps here too.
- Book a gloss a couple times through the winter instead of waiting until spring to notice your color looks tired.
You already dress for a Colorado winter. Your hair is dealing with the same cold, the same dry air, and the same sun — let's actually plan for it instead of being surprised every March.
Bisous,
Nikay