Why do We Need to Scarf Our Hair Before We Go to Sleep?

Although many women tend to go to bed with their hair simply down or up in a ponytail, sleeping with a scarf in your hair can help maintain healthy hair and keep it tame. If you want to promote the health of your hair, learn why you should scarf up your hair before you hit the hay to keep it healthy.

Anyone wanting to promote healthy hair should consider wrapping their hair in a hair scarf at night. People who should definitely wrap their hair at night to protect it are those with long hair, especially hair that flows past the shoulder blades. Also, if you want to keep a hairstyle-- such as if you have lots of curls or want to maintain straightness--wrapping your hair at night can help you do so.

Avoiding tangles is one of the main benefits of putting your hair in a scarf at night. As you sleep, your head tosses and shifts throughout the night, and hair also gets matted on the blanket. This can lead to some serious tangles and mats in your hair, which in turn can cause breakage when you attempt to comb them out in the morning.

While tangles can cause breakage in the morning, sleeping with your hair unwrapped can also cause breakage. A common cause is the fabric of your pillowcase, commonly cotton fabrics, which hair can get caught on and subsequently break as you move around at night. Your hair may also get wrapped or entangled in your pajamas, if it is past your shoulders or in your arms and hands as you sleep. Keeping it wrapped up can prevent nighttime breakage considerably.

Dry hair can cause damage and weaken hair, making it more susceptible to breakage, and giving it a lackluster look, which is why you should also wear a scarf at night. Many of your common pillowcase fabrics can pull moisture and essential oils your hair needs out of hair, leaving it dryer and more brittle come morning. To prevent this, you can wear a head scarf and sleep on a satin pillowcase, as satin draw moisture in as much as other fabrics will.

While scarves tend to come in a variety of materials, for a nighttime head scarf you want to stick to a satin or silk material. These will hold hair in place without pulling away moisture. Also, thanks to these materials' softness, hair will glide easily against them and not get caught in their fibers.

How you choose to wrap your scarf is also important to insuring your hair gets the most benefit from it. One method is to wrap the scarf around your forehead, bring it underneath your hair at the base of the neck and tie up ends. With this method though, you need to insure you don’t get any hair caught in the knot, which can be difficult as you can’t see the back of your neck. Another method is to gather hair into the scarf at the nape of your neck and tie ends together atop your head, so that you can easily see hair and insure you don’t tie it into your knot.