Habits
Why your hair looks worse at night than in the morning
A good many of the women who write to us describe checking their parting last thing at night in the bathroom mirror and going to bed upset. It is the worst possible time and place to look, and it is worth understanding why before you decide anything on the evidence of it.
What the day does to hair
Lift goes. Hair dried with any root lift in the morning settles under its own weight through the day. By evening the roots are lying flat against the head, and flat roots show scalp. Nothing has fallen out; it has fallen down.
Oil builds. The scalp produces oil continuously. Twelve hours in, it has reached the first inch of hair and clumped the fine hairs at the parting into strands, and clumped hair shows more scalp between the clumps. This is why a wash day parting looks narrower than a day-three parting on the same head.
It has been touched. Pushed back, tucked, tied up and taken down, had a child hang off it. Every touch redistributes the hair away from where it was arranged in the morning.
Not sure which one is you?
Take the two-minute hair quiz
Twelve quick questions. We tell you what we think is going on, what to do about it, and we say so if it is something we cannot help with.
Start the quiz →The light is worse. A bathroom at night is lit from above, by one bulb, which throws the scalp into relief. The same parting under morning window light from the side would look half as wide.
You are worse. At the end of a day with children you are tired, and tired people see their bodies unkindly. The same face in the same mirror at seven in the morning gets a different verdict.
The two-minute fix, if you want one
Flip the head upside down, rough the roots with fingers for twenty seconds, flip back. Move the parting an inch to one side with a comb. If the roots are oily, a light powder rather than an aerosol, brushed through. The parting closes and the hair lifts. It will not survive the night, but it demonstrates that the width you saw was arrangement, not absence.
The rule
Do not assess your hair at night. Assess it once a month, in the morning, in the same light, with the camera, the way the protocol describes, and with the tape measure the way the ponytail test describes. Everything else is weather.
When the evening is right
If the parting looks wider in the evening than it did in the evening three months ago, in the same mirror, that is a real change, and the monthly photograph will confirm it. The point is not that evening hair is fine; it is that evening hair should be compared with evening hair, and best of all not compared by eye at all.
Ready to read your own pattern?
Take the two-minute hair quiz
Twelve questions. We tell you what we think is going on for you, and we say so if it is something a GP should see first.
Start the quiz →
