Take one look at a wedding board on Pinterest, and you’ll immediately be bombarded by stunning hairstyles. When I was planning my wedding, I worked my butt off to give my hair as much love as possible to achieve “mermaid hair” for the big day. I wanted long, beautiful, luscious locks to cascade down my back. So, I set about finding all the wedding hair care products I could test to set myself up for success chasing that goal. 

If I just described you, this post is exactly what you need. 

When I set out to write this article, I’d planned to include all of my Products and Practices in one post, but it quickly became far too long for one. So, in this article I’m going to be covering the six best products you can use to take care of the hair you’ve already grown. And if you want to dive into all things routines, you’ll want to read this post!

Before we dive into the good stuff, I do want to set a disclaimer: 

When it comes to growing out your hair, unfortunately there’s no one quick fix. If there was, I’d have found it by now. When it comes to your hair and implementing what I’m about to share with you, you need to think of your hair like a vegetable garden: you’re planting the seeds for next season’s harvest. Start early.

Once your hair grows a couple of inches out of your head, you’re fighting an uphill battle to take care of it. Your energy will be so much better spent working to foster a great environment at the source for future hair to grow than trying to resurrect flimsy or frayed lengths. In other words, you’ll spend twice as much energy trying to transform your lengths than setting yourself up for successful future growth. Taking care of your lengths is important, but it’s not our main strategy.

Now that I’ve laid the groundwork for you, let’s get started!

Hair Product #1: Pre-Shampoo Mask from Prose

This wedding hair care product is at the top of my list because it might be my favorite. I’m usually too impatient to do it (showers are long enough as it is, with having to wash my hair 3-4 times 🥴), but when I do I’m always glad for it. It makes my hair smell so good and gives it an extra boost of silkiness. This mask is nice and heavy so it really sits on your hair, and doesn’t just run through it like a water-based conditioner. In an ideal world, you would do this 1-2 times a week, depending on how much hydration your hair could use.

(Want $20 off your first Prose order? Heck yeah you do. Here’s a link for that.)

Hair Product #2: Hair Serum from Function of Beauty

Gosh, I just love Function of Beauty’s product photos. Like, tell me this photo does not make you want to just soak your entire body in this pool of oil for all the sunny vibes. The bottle fits in your palm, and it lasts for freaking ever. I have a friend with the same bottle and she recently texted me a picture of her half-empty bottle, celebrating that she’d finally made it to that milestone. A little goes a long way, so you definitely get your money’s worth out of this! 

Function’s website says you should distribute this serum along your lengths, but I focus it on my ends because that’s where my hair needs the most support (and I already struggle with oil control). But don’t go overboard here. While it’s good for you, this is still oil – build on your use so you don’t make your hair look oily in a bad way.

Hair Product #3: Conditioner Spray (available at grocery stores)

Can you see a trend here? Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate. To illustrate how important this is, I want you to picture a leaf in the summer that you pull off a tree. It’s bright green and healthy. When you pinch the ends together to fold it in half, the leaf will bend – but return right back to its original form when you let go. Now imagine it’s autumn, and that tree has dropped all of its leaves. Visualize picking one off the ground, and doing the same thing of folding it in half. I probably don’t need to tell you what’ll happen, right? The leaf will snap clear in half.

Your hair is the same. When it’s hydrated, there’s a far lower chance it’ll become brittle enough to snap – which is what creates breakage (and that can happen anywhere up and down the hair strand, not just the ends). The name of the game here is to avoid breakage, because there is absolutely no coming back from that. 

I absolutely love this hair spray from Pantene. It smells so good (but be sure to apply in a well-ventilated area), and immediately makes my hair softer and silkier. When I haven’t brushed my hair in a couple days and I can feel that it’ll give me a hard time to comb out, I’ll spray this on my hair first and boom: instant detangler.

Hair Product #4: Silk Bandanas and Night Bonnets

Remember what I said at the top about playing the long game with your hair care and how your best bet is to treat your roots like royalty? A silk bandana, turban, or bonnet is the first line of defense to protect those precious inches. Basically, you’re trying to give your baby hair follicles the best chance they have of succeeding out in the world when they grow up. 

A silk pillowcase will serve the same purpose as a bandana or turban here, but my skin is super oily and I don’t love the idea of putting that onto a silk pillowcase; so instead, I tie up a bandana around my hairline before going to sleep, and tuck the triangle end under the knot at the nape of my neck. Silk is a secret weapon in wedding hair care products: unlike cotton, it pretty much eliminates friction on your hair that’s created from moving your head around while you sleep. Friction = breakage.

While I’ve switched to wearing a silk bonnet at night (even more protection than a bandana), these are the bandanas I used and loved previously.

Hair Product #5: Scrunchies

You may or may not love the resurgence of this 90s trend, but it has a real hair health benefit! Quick backstory: I’ve been using standard rubber hair ties all of my adult life. You know, the boring, black ones you buy on a piece of cardboard for $0.30 a pop. They did what I needed them to, and I didn’t think anything more of it. For a long time, I’d been implementing all the other things in this article, but I still struggled like mad against my ends breaking. I could not figure out why the hell my ends were so trashy no matter what else I threw at them. I was constantly cutting off multiple inches of hair because it was that far gone. What the hell was happening?

It finally dawned on me a couple months later: I was suffocating my ends by using an ultra-tight, constricting hair tie in the same place, every single day. 

My head just about exploded with the realization. 

I immediately went out and bought a couple scrunchies to replace my hair ties with. No need to get anything fancy: I found a stack at my grocery store for only a couple bucks! Don’t forget, the point of these is to give your hair some room to breathe; so don’t be triple-wrapping these in your hair. I use these at night and when I only need a loose way to pull my hair out of my face. When I need a solid and secure ponytail (like for a workout), I use one of my standard hair ties. 

Hair Product #6: Vitamins/Supplements  

If you’ve ever investigated what foods make you feel blah and why (usual culprits are dairy, alcohol, and sugar – inflammatory foods), you’ll know how much of an effect what we eat has on our bodies. Our hair is no different! When you’re playing the long game and working to set your future self up for bougie hair, this is an area that should not be neglected. 

Bummer news though: you won’t be able to see overnight progress with supplements. Or even monthly progress. As a wedding hair care product, this is definitely a longggg-term strategy that needs a lot of commitment on your part – I’m talking 3-6 months and beyond. If you’re already in the habit of taking a daily medication or vitamin, this should be pretty easy to stack on, but if daily pill-popping is new for you, I’d recommend reading up on habit-building tips to give yourself the best chance of success.

Consistency is key with hair supplements as a wedding hair care product, so I only recommend this route if you think you’ll be able to keep up with it. But don’t let that scare you off from trying this if you’re interested; it won’t be the end of the world if you miss a day here or there!

If you want to get started, this article from Forbes outlines the best vitamins to take. The Forbe’s article also recommends two others I already take, but for purposes other than hair growth. Win-win there! We love a vitamin that pulls double duty. 💪

Taking proper care of your hair can feel like a full time job sometimes, but it’s always worth it in the end, especially if you’re craving drool-worthy wedding locks that are both stunning and healthy. If you haven’t already checked out my companion hair-care article about the six practices I employ for even more epic hair care, you’ll definitely want to read up on that.

Cheers to you for getting after your dreamy hair goals! Your future wedding-day self will thank you for getting started today. Remember: you’re planting the seeds for next year’s harvest.