fine hair or split strand

[ErinLeigh]

How can you tell when you have fine hair and layers...which hairs are just fine and just stuck together - and which may have split really high up? is it possible for a hair to split all the way up dividing into 2 ultra thin strands? Or are some stands a little thinner than others? Its really hard to tell with me without pulling it out from the root which I do not want to do. ow high can a split go? I find it hard to believe I have no splis. So are they just really far up the shaft?
Gah i gotta learn to post pictures so I can explain myself.

[anax]

I don't think theyd go up more than 1 or 2 inches, and theyd probaby snap off any further up . I don't get alot of split ends anymore, think its amazing what no heat styling and keeping ends moisturised does! but when i used to notice badly split ends they didnt split exactly in half its like a 1/4 of the strand was shredded off so alot finer than the main strand.

[Madora]

Splits can appear anywhere on the strands, not just the bottom.

Your hair can have different diameters. Doesn't make any difference to splitting.

It is impossible to examine every.single.hair for splits or white dots. Just try and catch the ones you can see.

[torrilin]

You probably can't post pictures that would show what you mean without the aid of a microscope. Not realistic if you want to keep your hair attached to your head.

If you've got fine hair, splits are more obvious as a texture thing. Intact hairs (at least for us 1s) are relatively tangle resistant. You'll get some snarls and tangles from shed hairs, but removing the shed hair will take care of most of it. I'll start detangling unbraiding my hair, and then I'll gently pull at the longest ends to see if there are any that are shed hairs. Often I can pull out what looks like a giant wad of hair without much tangling or fuss. Then I detangle from the ends up. This should be a pretty quick and pain free process, with the biggest issue being all the damn shed hairs.

Once my hair is all detangled, I move a bit. Since my hair is fine and floaty, it will get somewhat disordered. Then I try to run my fingers through starting at the scalp. If my hair is fairly split free, my fingers won't catch on tangles much, and when I examine the tangled hairs, I won't find splits. The more splits in my hair, the more tangles will form.

A tangle high up near my scalp doesn't necessarily mean a hair is split the whole way up there. It's a lot more likely the split is at the end of a hair, and it caught at a point much higher up. Detangling the snarl will usually make it obvious. Snip off the split ends you find from the snarl. They'll be pretty obvious. Because split ends form from the hair drying out and fraying under wear, you should give yourself at least 1/2" of hair that seems ok up the shaft past the split. If you find a white dot on the shaft at that spot? Your hair was fraying there and the frayed end broke off. Go up another half inch or so. You will sometimes find quite long and feathery hairs where the fraying continues for 6" or more. Pretty rare, but it happens. You've got somewhere around 60k to 120k hairs on your head. Better to trim off the damaged part so it can't cause more trouble.

If the snarl is too hard to detangle working from the bottom, you probably have a large number of split hairs that are trying to form a dreadlock. Just cut the snarl out. It's fine to work at it and trim stuff that you can see is obviously split, or hairs that feel suspicious to you to see if you can work out the structure some. But really, it is better for your hair to cut out the tangles that mat up that fast in freshly detangled hair. You *know* there is evil lurking, even if you can't identify what exactly is wrong.

I don't try to eliminate every single split end. I've got pretty fine and dense hair, so odds are my scalp is more towards the 100k hairs end of things. It'd take over 1000 split hairs to make it so 1% of my hair was split, and finding those splits if you're looking one by one would be nightmarish. I can speed it up by targeting obvious trouble spots... but realistically I can't individually inspect each hair fast enough to eliminate all splits. I can keep the split level down to something I find comfortable.

[ErinLeigh]

torrilin that was very informative. thanks you. And thank you everyone for replies. I am so worried about my fragile hair everything is making me second guess and wonder.
I never understood what white dots were so that helps a lot even.