Why Is My Scalp So Dry in Colorado?
Colorado is not just dry. It is unstable. One day it is a hundred degrees, the next it is snowing, and the day after that the snow has melted off and a cold front is coming through. We live in a high desert, and the thing that confuses hair and skin here is not any one condition. It is the swing between them.
That is usually what is behind a dry, tight, itchy scalp after a move. It is not a scalp condition. It is a routine that was calibrated for a climate that stayed roughly the same from one week to the next, now running in a climate that will not hold still, with a shampoo that suited humid air stripping a scalp that has nothing to spare. Wash less often, change what you are washing with, and most people are back to normal without any medicated product at all.
The reason it moves around so much is that hair and skin are not sealed. Hair is hygroscopic: it takes water up from the air around it and gives it back, and how much it is carrying at any given moment depends on the air it has most recently been sitting in (Breakspear et al., International Journal of Cosmetic Science, 2022). If the air swings, the hair swings with it, and your scalp is skin doing the same thing. That is why it can be fine one week and flaking the next without you having changed a single thing you do to it.
That is the short answer for the scalp. Your hair is a second, separate problem, and it has its own answer further down.
The short version
- Scalp first. Wash less often than you did before, and turn the water temperature down.
- Then look at the bottle. Most shampoos are built for hair, not for scalp. In our experience the product is the thing that changes results the fastest.
- Flakes are not automatically dandruff. Dry scalp and dandruff look similar and are not the same thing, and a third group of conditions looks like both. Persistent redness, scaly patches or hair loss is a dermatologist's job, not a shampoo's.
- Drinking more water is not the fix people on the internet think it is. The evidence for it is thin, and it is about skin generally, not scalp.
- For hair, dry air is most of it. Stronger sun and moderately hard water are most of the rest.
- A humidifier in the bedroom does more for most transplants than anything they can buy in a bottle.
Dry scalp or dandruff, how do you tell?
This is the question we get most often from people in their first year here, and it matters, because the two problems point at opposite solutions.
What dry scalp looks like
The American Academy of Dermatology describes dry scalp as what happens when skin "loses too much water", and names two everyday causes: hair products that strip the skin's natural oils, and low humidity and cold climates. That is a fair description of a Colorado winter and of most drugstore shampoo, arriving at the same time. The flakes tend to be small, fine and white, the scalp feels tight rather than greasy, and the skin elsewhere on you is usually dry too. Source: American Academy of Dermatology, Is your dry scalp something more serious?
What dandruff looks like
The AAD describes dandruff as a common scalp condition in which small pieces of dry skin flake off the scalp, and links it to seborrheic dermatitis. In practice the flakes are usually larger and can look yellowish or oily rather than powdery, the scalp is often oilier rather than tight, and it does not improve when you moisturize everything else about your life. Dandruff responds to a dandruff shampoo. Dry scalp usually does not need one, and a medicated shampoo used on a scalp that is only dry can make the dryness worse. Source: American Academy of Dermatology, How to treat dandruff.
When it is neither
Some things that look like a dry scalp are not a hair care problem at all. The AAD names psoriasis, which can show reddish or dark reddish patches with silvery flaking and temporary hair loss, tinea capitis or scalp ringworm, which shows scaly patches usually alongside patches of hair loss, and actinic keratoses, which are sun damage and appear as dry, scaly, rough patches or bumps. The AAD's own advice is that if over the counter products do not do the trick, it is time to see a board certified dermatologist for a proper diagnosis, and that a dermatologist is the one who can tell whether flaking is a sign of seborrheic dermatitis, psoriasis, a fungal infection or eczema.
We are hairdressers. We are not going to diagnose anything, and we will say so in the chair. If your scalp is red, sore, scaly in patches, or you are losing hair, please see a dermatologist. Everything below this line is for the ordinary dry, itchy scalp that arrived with the move.
What we recommend for a dry, itchy scalp here
This is Miles's answer, in the order he gives it in the chair.
Wash less often
It is the first thing, and for a lot of people it is the whole thing. Whatever your interval was in a humid climate, stretch it. Turn the water temperature down while you are at it.
The bigger problem is usually the product
In Miles's experience, the thing that actually changes results is not how often you wash but what you are washing with. Many shampoos and conditioners, and especially the cheap ones, lean on fillers and inexpensive surfactants, and what those leave behind builds up on the scalp and on the hair. Buildup is the most common thing he finds when someone has been fighting an itchy scalp for months and has already tried six shampoos.
Going sulfate free, sodium chloride free and paraben free is not enough on its own. Those are all statements about what has been taken out. The question worth asking is what has been put in to replace them.
Shampoo should clean the scalp first and the hair second
That is the principle we work from, and most formulas are built the other way round: made for the hair, with the scalp treated as the thing the hair happens to be attached to. If your scalp is the part that is unhappy, that ordering matters.
What Miles recommends
Davines OI Shampoo and OI Conditioner. He recommends them because of how they land across very different heads of hair: fine to thick, oily to dry, they bring people to a neutral state rather than drying the hair out and then needing a second product to offset it, and they do not tip fine or oily hair into greasy. Clients rebuy it, which is the only product review we really trust.
Davines is an Italian company, founded in Parma in 1983, and in its own words its formulations favor the use of ingredients of natural origin. Their OI range runs across hair and skin, and includes an OI Shampoo, OI Conditioner, OI Oil, an OI Body Wash and an OI Hand Balm, all built on the same base ingredient. We carry the line and we can show you the actual bottles rather than a description of them. More on why we stock it on our Davines page.
One thing we will not tell you to do is put hair oil on your scalp. Oil belongs on the mid lengths and the ends. It is not a scalp product.
Does drinking more water fix a dry scalp?
Not really, and it is worth saying plainly, because it is the single most repeated piece of advice on every Denver forum thread about dry skin and dry scalp, and it is also the one that gets contradicted most often by the people who tried it.
The claim is that Colorado dryness is a hydration problem and eight glasses a day will fix it. The honest version is more modest. The one systematic review of the question, Akdeniz and colleagues in Skin Research and Technology in 2018, pooled six studies and concluded that additional dietary water intake may increase stratum corneum hydration, that the underlying biological mechanism is unknown, and that "overall the evidence is weak in terms of quantity and methodological quality". What effect they did find was slight, and it showed up mainly in people who had been drinking very little to begin with. Source: Akdeniz M, Tomova-Simitchieva T, Dobos G, Blume-Peytavi U, Kottner J. Does dietary fluid intake affect skin hydration in healthy humans? A systematic literature review. Skin Research and Technology, 2018.
So: drink water because you live at altitude and it is a sensible thing to do. Do not expect it to solve a scalp that is being dried out from the outside. Every study in that review was about skin, not scalp, and the dermatology advice for a dry scalp is about what you put on it and what environment it is sitting in.
Why does the dry air change how my hair behaves?
Hair takes water up from the air around it and gives it back, and how much it is holding depends on the humidity it has most recently been sitting in. That is measurable: work published in the International Journal of Cosmetic Science recorded moisture sorption and desorption curves for hair across the full range of relative humidity, and found that the fibre's mechanical behaviour changes along with its water content. Source: Breakspear S, Frueh P, Neu A, Noecker B, Popescu C, Uellner Q. Learning from hair moisture sorption and hysteresis. International Journal of Cosmetic Science, 2022.
In plain terms: in a humid climate your hair was carrying more water than it is carrying here. That is where the weight, the movement and the spring came from. Move it into dry air and it settles at a lower water content, so it is less pliable, quicker to snap at the ends, quicker to build a static charge, and flatter than you remember.
It is also why frizz feels different here. Somewhere humid, frizz is hair swelling as it pulls water in. Here it is the opposite: the surface of the strand is dry and roughed up, so it catches on itself and on everything else.
Does Colorado really have zero humidity?
No, and this one is repeated so often locally that it is worth correcting with the actual record. NOAA's Comparative Climatic Data table for average relative humidity gives Denver, over a 1995 to 2018 period of record, an annual average of 50 percent in the morning and 43 percent in the afternoon. Month by month the morning figures run from about 46 to 55 percent, and even the driest afternoon average, in July, is 35 percent. That is dry. It is not a desert, and it is not zero. Source: NOAA NCEI, Comparative Climatic Data, Average Relative Humidity (data through 2023).
The real dry story is indoors, in winter. Warm air can hold more water vapor than cold air, so the same amount of moisture gives a lower relative humidity once the air is warmed, which the National Weather Service explains directly: with the same absolute humidity, air "will have a HIGHER relative humidity if the air is cooler, and a LOWER relative humidity if the air is warmer". Take Colorado's cold, already dry winter air, pull it into a heated house, and the relative humidity in the room drops well below the 30 to 50 percent band the EPA recommends for homes. You then spend four months in it. Sources: National Weather Service, Relative Humidity; US EPA, Biological Contaminants and Indoor Air Quality.
Does a humidifier actually help, or will it make my hair frizzy?
It helps, and for most transplants it is the highest value thing on this page. The frizz worry comes from humid climates, where frizz is caused by too much moisture in the air. Bringing a bedroom from very dry up to something normal is not that. You are not creating Houston in your bedroom, you are stopping your hair and scalp spending eight hours a night in air drier than the outdoors.
What Miles does for dry hair
OI Shampoo and OI Conditioner, then OI Oil through the mid lengths and ends. He uses the oil two ways: on wet hair before it is dried, and on dry hair to seal and to protect it. The point of the oil is to help hold moisture in and to give the hair some protection against dry air and heat.
What clients tell us they notice is straightforward: it is smoother and softer, there is less frizz and less static, and it holds up better between washes. That is what we can honestly promise, and it is what we would rather promise than a mechanism.
What else helps with dry air
- A heavier conditioner than the one that worked where you came from.
- Wash less often, and turn the water temperature down.
- Less heat styling, and a heat protectant every single time you do use heat.
- Do not walk out to the car in freezing weather with wet hair. Wet hair is weaker than dry hair, and freezing water inside a soaked strand puts real physical stress on it.
There is more on the cold months in what Colorado winters actually do to your hair.
Does the altitude itself damage my hair?
Not directly. The Front Range sits roughly a mile above sea level, around 5,000 to 5,500 feet depending on the town. Elevation does two things that matter for hair, and neither is damage in the way people picture it. The air up here is drier, which is the whole section above. And there is less atmosphere overhead to absorb ultraviolet light before it reaches you, so the sun is genuinely harder on your hair and your color than it was at sea level.
Is UV really 8 to 10 percent stronger for every 1,000 feet?
No. That figure is repeated all over the hair and skin care industry, and it is wrong twice over.
The measurement usually being pointed at is Blumthaler, Ambach and Ellinger (1997), who compared clear sky summer daily totals between Innsbruck at 577 metres and Jungfraujoch at 3,576 metres. Per 1,000 metres of elevation gain they found:
- total global irradiance rose about 8 percent, plus or minus 2
- UVA rose about 9 percent, plus or minus 2
- erythemal UV, the sunburn effective part, rose about 18 percent, plus or minus 2
The industry version takes the total irradiance number, which is the least relevant of the three for burning, and then states a per 1,000 metre rate as though it were per 1,000 feet. A thousand metres is about 3,281 feet, so the sunburn effective figure works out to roughly 5 to 6 percent per 1,000 feet. Source: Blumthaler, Ambach and Ellinger, Increase in solar UV radiation with altitude, Journal of Photochemistry and Photobiology B, 1997.
We are not going to hand you a single number for how much stronger the sun is in Broomfield. That study's measurements start at 577 metres, and stretching them down to sea level to produce a headline multiplier is further than the data goes. The rate is honest. A multiplier would not be.
Does altitude slow hair growth?
You will read online that altitude slows hair growth or causes hair loss. Some of those pages put numbers on it: follicle activity down "by up to 40 percent," scalp blood flow "reduced 15 to 20 percent above 2,500 metres." Those figures come from a hair-loss clinic's blog, not from a study, and the page that repeats them cites no research for any of them. Note the altitude too: 2,500 metres is well above the Front Range, which sits around a mile up, roughly 1,600 metres.
Here is what the research actually contains. There is no human study showing that living at Front Range altitude changes how fast hair grows. Scalp hair grows at roughly one centimetre a month, and the rate is set by your follicle's growth cycle, which responds to blood supply, hormones, nerves, age and nutrition. Altitude, oxygen and climate are not on that list.
The studies that get cited are real, but they are not about people in Colorado. One measured cashmere goats on the Tibetan plateau above 5,000 metres, where thin air and near-freezing cold together slowed follicle development, and it makes no claim about humans. One tied off an artery in mice so the skin got half its normal oxygen, and those hairs grew shorter, which is surgical ischemia, not altitude. And one looked at human follicle cells in a dish and found that the cell's own low-oxygen response protein actually switched on hair-growth genes, which points the other way entirely.
So if your hair feels like it is growing slower since you moved here, it is almost certainly breaking, not growing slower. Dry air, static, friction and heat styling on drier hair all snap off length faster than it used to, and the ends look the same as they did months ago. That is a moisture and breakage problem, and it is fixable. It is not your follicles.
Sources: Hoover E, Alhajj M, Flores JL. Physiology, Hair. StatPearls, 2023. He Y et al. Animals 2021;11(10):2798 (Tibetan cashmere goats). Kato H et al. Organogenesis 2020;16(3):83-94 (mouse ischemia model). Seo J et al. Scientific Reports 2023, doi 10.1038/s41598-023-28837-0 (human dermal papilla cells).
What helps at altitude
- A leave in or an oil with UV protection before a long day outside.
- A hat when you are out for hours, and especially on snow, which throws a lot of that light straight back up at you.
- A gloss on a schedule, to put tone back into color the sun has pulled out.
Is the water here part of it?
Yes, and it is the part most people never think to check. Broomfield's water runs moderately hard, which means it carries calcium and magnesium. Those minerals deposit on the hair, and that buildup is usually what people are describing when they say their hair feels filmy a few days after a wash, that their color looks dull, or that their blonde keeps pulling warm even though the toner was right when they left the salon.
What helps with hard water
- A chelating or clarifying shampoo every couple of weeks. Not daily. That is too much.
- A gloss on a regular schedule, which does more to keep color true than almost anything in a bottle.
- A shower filter if you want one, though we would rather you spent the money on your color than on gadgets.
There is more in is Broomfield's water actually hard. And if you swim and your blonde has gone green, that is copper rather than chlorine, which we explain in why pool water turns blonde hair green.
Why is my hair so staticky all of a sudden?
Because hair with very little water in it cannot dissipate an electric charge. Every time a wool hat, a scarf, a sweater or a car seat rubs against it, the charge builds and has nowhere to go. Dry air is what makes that possible, which is exactly why you did not have this problem in a wetter climate.
What helps with static
- Moisture is the only real fix. A leave in or a light oil through the lengths gives static less to work with.
- Go easier on brushing, especially a plastic brush on dry hair.
- The bedroom humidifier again.
What does Colorado do to color treated hair?
This is where transplants notice the change fastest, usually within an appointment cycle or two.
Why does my hair color fade so fast here?
Three things at once. There is more direct sun on it. Dry hair with a roughed up cuticle does not hold pigment as well as hair in better condition. And mineral heavy water dulls the tone underneath every time you wash. Reds and coppers are usually the first thing clients notice fading, then lightened hair loses its tone.
Why has my blonde gone brassy?
Minerals from hard water deposit warm, sun oxidizes what is already there, and the toner or gloss over your lightening is semi or demi permanent by design, so it is always on its way out. Somewhere humid with softer water that toner might have outlasted your interval. Here it often does not. A gloss and shine runs $55 to $85 and is the lowest starting price on our color list, and for a lot of transplants that one small appointment between the big ones is the entire fix. Prices are on our services page.
If you arrived with a color history from a stylist you can no longer get to, or you have been patching it yourself since the move, that is color correction rather than a color appointment. You can book it online with Nicole, Jadyn, Ally, Amanda or Miles, then give us a call so the plan is right before anyone opens a bowl. More on upkeep on our balayage page.
What about curly and wavy hair?
We wrote a full guide to this: why your curls look different in Colorado, with the curl-type walk-through and product weight by type. The short version: Curl is the one that surprises people, because it goes both ways. Frizz is driven by humidity, so in drier air a frizz prone texture often relaxes and behaves better than it ever did back home. Other people find their curl goes limp and undefined here. Both are real.
The deciding factor, in our experience, is product weight matched to the curl type, along with the right shampoo and conditioner. Under weighted product in dry air gives you dry, frizzy and undefined. Over weighted gives you limp and greasy with the curl pulled straight out. That is a fitting problem, not a climate verdict.
What helps with curls
- Apply styling product to soaking wet hair rather than damp, so the curl has water to set around.
- Diffuse rather than air drying in dry air, which tends to pull the curl out as it goes.
- Clarify occasionally to get mineral buildup off, then follow it with a real conditioning treatment.
- Get the weight right before you change anything else.
Both Miles and Nicole have curl training, so if your curl has stopped doing what it used to since the move, ask for one of them when you book.
Where to start
If you moved here recently and your scalp or your hair is not doing what it used to, come and sit in the chair. Tell us where you moved from and what your hair used to do. Photos of it on a good day help more than a description. We talk the plan through before we start, then we get to work, and you leave happy with it.
Mahne Roots Collective
11566 Colony Row, Broomfield, CO 80021
(720) 240-9391
Monday to Saturday, 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM
Book online or call us. More answers on our FAQ page, and the full list on our services page.