As a homeowner, your main aim is to have adequate water to keep everything that needs water at home running. However, although you have the water in your home, some of the water could be doing more harm than good. That is if you are living at a place where you only have access to hard water. Although the water may seem harmless, long term use of hard water may have some severe effects on various areas.
Your hair and skin are some of the areas that are profoundly affected by the continued use of hard water. That explains why you need to get a water softening system like a fleck softener to help soften the hard water supplied. Below are some of these problems caused by the use of hard water.
Hard Water Causes Dry And Dull Hair
Dry hair is one thing that you will be willing to eliminate at all costs. You can get many hair products promising to keep your hair moist. However, if you are using hard water, keeping off dry hair is easier said than done. The hard water makes the items used to make hair moist such as shampoos and conditioners less effective.
Dry hair lacks the protective oils that strengthen the hair, thus making it weak and brittle. That makes it hard to manage and maintain. Therefore, if you realize that your hair is the kind that is always dry and hard to upkeep regardless of the moisturizers you are using, then the problem could be using hard water to clean your hair.
It Makes The Skin Itchy
When you wash your skin and more so the face, you take off any minerals such as calcium that may have built up, thus the relaxing feeling. For this reason, if you are using the hard water full of minerals to clean the face, it will not be as effective.
As a result, the excess sodium makes your skin sticky and tight. In other cases, you will realize that the skin becomes itchy and red due to excess sodium. Additionally, washing off skin-care products and making up your face with hard water is tricky since it will not lather well with soap. Therefore, you are likely to have itchy skin due to the products left behind on your skin after trying to wash them off with hard water.
Causes Less Hair Body And Change Of Hair Color
Ideally, when you clean your hair with hard water, the water’s minerals will coat the hair follicles. After some time, it will result in having hair with less volume and make the hair appear limp. To help avoid this, one may opt to go for options such as volumizers. However, the minerals in the hard water will, again, make the volumizers less effective.
On the other hand, the minerals in hard water can cause hair color to fade. Therefore, if your hair is natural but still realizes some fading, then hard water may be the culprit. Try using soft water and see whether you can recognize a change.
Acne Breakouts
The surest way to keep acne off your face is to keep your face clean. However, if the water that you are using for cleaning is hard, then it is possible that the cleaning you do causes more harm than good. That is because hard water prevents soap from lathering and catalyzes less suds in the water.
As a result, you may think that you have washed off the soap scum on your body, but it remains on the skin. The scum later clogs the pores, which automatically leads to acne on your skin. The clogged pores could also cause other severe problems on the epidermis. It is for this reason that you are advised to avoid using hard water in the long term.
Causes Increased Dandruff
Dandruff is a common hair problem and more so to those with thick hair. The most effective solution against dandruff is the use of special shampoos and conditioners when cleaning the hair. However, if you are using effective products with hard water, they will not be as effective as you expect them to be.
The minerals in the water will make it impossible for the shampoos to lather well with soap, making it hard for you to clean dandruff. That will mean increased visits to the salon and thus an increase in your budget.
More often than not, you blame the terrible condition of your hair or skin on the products that you are using. However, in some cases, the use of hard water is the reason for the nightmare. Keep the adverse effects mentioned above, away from your skin and hair, by avoiding hard water.