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How to Grow Your Hair Faster | What Really Works?

If you want to learn how to grow your hair faster, you have to pay attention to research and results to find out what actually works and what’s bunk. Find the answers to this and much more in the complete guide below.

Wondering How to Grow Your Hair Faster?

Hair growth supplements, prescription medications, scalp massage, hair growth shampoos, modern-day magic potions – humans never seem to stop coming up with ways to make hair grow faster. Almost every product claims to work miracles, but most just don’t give results. 

There are several reasons you might want to grow your hair faster. Maybe you’ve recently gotten a haircut that ended up shorter than you wanted, or you’re over the short length and want to grow it out fast.

Perhaps you’re obsessing over a long hairstyle that you can’t wear until your hair reaches a certain length. You might be experiencing thinning or hair that seems to grow more slowly as you get older.

Or maybe you’re just interested to see how fast your hair can actually grow when it has the ideal conditions. In any case, growing your hair out fast isn’t really a thing – hair grows very slowly, (about half an inch per month) even in ideal conditions.

But what you can do is learn how to grow your hair faster with clinically proven and effective methods and treatments. There are three reliable ways to supercharge your hair growth and speed up the process a bit.

These are simple things you can do to create ideal conditions for hair growth without taking a prescription medication. We’ll go over those methods and share some of the science behind them in this guide! 

How to Grow Your Hair Faster: 3 Proven Methods

Boosting your vitamin and nutrient intake, changing your current hair care routine, and reaching for topical products can supercharge your hair growth. You can start to increase your hair growth rate with any or all of these three proven methods. 

1. Boost Your Vitamin and Nutrient Intake

For a piece on how to make hair grow faster, a number of capsules lying on a piece of hair

IVASHstudio/Shutterstock

Your body’s hair growth process is similar to cooking. You start out with raw ingredients (in this case, protein, vitamins, and micronutrients) and combine them together to create your “dish.”

But if an ingredient is missing or there isn’t enough of it, you’re not going to end up with the dish you wanted. Hair contains mostly keratin, a protein. But it’s about 12-15% water and contains trace amounts of calcium, cadmium, chromium, copper, zinc, iron, and silicon, too.

And a range of nutrients, vitamins, and minerals are all required for your body to be able to churn out new hair growth. If you’re setting out to cook French toast and discover you’re fresh out of eggs, you can’t make French toast.

Likewise, if your body is attempting to grow new hair, but you’re fresh out of an essential amino acid (the building blocks of the hair protein keratin) or biotin (a B-vitamin essential for hair growth), your hair growth will be stunted at best and slowed to a stop at worst.

So, ensuring you’re boosting your vitamin and nutrient intake is one proven way to increase your body’s hair growth abilities. Following a balanced diet can help you get most of what you need, but it’s a lot easier to get all your nutrient requirements in a single pill.

Supplements like FolexinViviscal, and Nutrafol are designed to supply you with the necessary vitamins, minerals, and nutrients for hair growth. We’ve done extensive reviews of all three supplements and found that Folexin has the best reviews, results, and value.

It contains unique ingredients that have been clinically proven to increase hair growth, including fo-ti (Chinese climbing knotweed) for reactivating dormant hair follicles and increasing hair density and growth rate. 

This ingredient alone has been shown to be as effective as the active ingredient in Rogaine (minoxidil). And on top of that, Folexin also contains all the vitamins, minerals, and nutrients your body needs to jumpstart hair growth. 

2. Avoid Breakage With Hair Care Routine Swaps

As an image for a piece on how to make your hair grow faster, a number of hair tools in a layflat image to symbolize the different routines to protect against hair damage

Didecs/Shutterstock

Avoiding breakage is probably the best way you can make your hair “grow faster.” If your hair is damaged, brittle, and unhealthy, you’d be shocked at the amount of length you’re actively losing during your normal hair care routines and processes due to breakage. 

Your hair might be growing just as quickly as it should, but if it’s breaking off left and right, you won’t see any length increase.

That’s okay because all it takes is a little reworking of your hair care routine to fix it. You can avoid breakage while boosting your hair’s strength, health, and shine by making a few simple tweaks. 

  • Switch to gentle, low-heat styling tools. The Dyson Supersonic hair dryer and Dyson Airwrap are both the gold standard for gentle, low-heat drying and styling. The Supersonic dryer reaches a max of 212 degrees Fahrenheit, while the Airwrap won’t exceed 302 degrees Fahrenheit. Protecting your hair from excess heat will help prevent breakage, and a bonus of using Dyson’s low-heat styling tools is shinier, softer hair. 
  • Ditch daily harsh shampoos. Daily shampoo has to go if you want to increase your growth by preventing breakage. Instead, focus on washing your hair less often – 2-3 times a week – to allow your natural oils to condition your scalp and keep follicles hydrated for growth. 
  • Be mindful with your hairbrush. Brushing is when a lot of breakage happens, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Be mindful as you use your brush, gently separating tangles and never ripping through snarls. Grab a boar bristle brush for the gentlest brushing (and many other benefits, like shinier hair and less frizz). 
  • Switch to satin or silk. If you’re sleeping on a cotton pillowcase, chances are, it’s causing a lot of breakage as you sleep. Switch to a satin or silk pillowcase to prevent breakage during the night. Satin and silk will allow your hair strands to glide across the pillowcase rather than becoming tangled or breaking off. 
  • Sleep in protective styles. Protective styles are key for, well, protecting your locks while they grow. Braids, twists, and loose buns are all great protective styles you can sleep in to further prevent breakage while you slumber. 

3. Top It off With Topical Treatments

Woman preparing to use biotin shampoo to make her hair grow faster

Aquarius Studio/Shutterstock

Certain topical treatments can help you boost your hair growth and improve your hair’s appearance.

Any hair growth shampoo, serum, oil, cream, or foam that goes directly on your hair and scalp is considered topical. These substances are sometimes preferred over oral supplements, especially if you’d like to get instant shine-boosting or softening effects (like biotin shampoo can offer). 

Topical treatments work in different ways to increase your hair growth. Several substances have been studied for their effects on hair growth when applied directly to the hair and scalp. Not all ingredients that boost growth when taken orally work when applied to the scalp.

But there are several really promising topical treatments you can use to start seeing faster-growing hair. Some of the most effective topical ingredients and products that have been shown or proven to increase hair growth include: 

Consider trying topical treatments in addition to oral vitamin and nutrient supplementation and a new breakage-busting hair routine. You’ll only improve your results by taking better care of your hair and body! 

Use a Holistic Approach to Make Your Hair Grow Faster

Layflat of nutrient-rich fruits and vegetables with a paper that says healthy hair

Danijela Maksimovic/Shutterstock

You should take a holistic, whole-body approach to get the optimal results from any hair growth routine or methods you use. Hair growth doesn’t happen independently in your body. It is part of a wider network of biological processes.

If you only focus on hair growth, you won’t get the results you’re hoping for. Instead, you need to focus on the health of your body as a whole. 

This means engaging in wellness and self-care activities whenever you can, eating a healthy diet with the macro and micronutrients your body needs, drinking plenty of water, sticking with a good sleep/wake schedule, and keeping your stress levels low (easy, right?).  

So, How Do You Make Your Hair Grow Faster?

So, there you have it — how to make your hair grow faster. You can speed up your body’s natural hair growth process with the simple methods we’ve listed here: 

  1. Boosting your vitamin and nutrient intake with proven supplements
  2. Avoiding breakage with a gentler hair care routine
  3. Topping it off with effective topical treatments

But think of these methods as just the start. When you make overall health and wellness your main priority, faster-growing, stronger, shinier hair is a natural “side effect.”

And if you stick with these methods while prioritizing your wellness as a whole, you’ll compound your results to get the maximum amount of hair growth in the shortest amount of time. 

How many inches do you want your hair to grow in the next few months? Now’s a great time to write down those hair goals – and get ready to crush them!