At Home Beauty Test Drive: Olive Oil Hair Mask

By JESSICA WAKEMAN

Updated 12:16 PM EDT, Mon, Nov 30, 2009

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Ugh. Winter is upon us. Global warming might be melting the ice caps but it sure hasn’t made the Northeastern United States any less crappy during the dark, cold month of November. Anyone else’s hair feel dry as a bale of hay?

Yeah, it’s the pits. The dry air has been making my usually-cute bob look terrible for weeks and I just couldn’t take it anymore! So last weekend, while my guy attended to a manly Korean barbecue expedition someplace, I ransacked the kitchen cupboards so I could test my very first at-home olive oil hair mask.

How to do it:

I found 407 recipes for “olive oil hair mask” on the Internet, all with different ingredients. A girl could add drops of frankincense or honey to her conditioning mask but I opted to just used olive oil by itself. I have short, chin-length hair, so I poured about a half a shot-glass worth of oil into a cereal bowl. I then wrapped a ratty old towel around my shoulders and headed to the bathroom.

Just pouring olive oil into your hair won’t work—you really need to massage the oil into your dry hair and scalp thoroughly with your fingertips till it looks all-over greasy. As soon as I vaguely resembled Danny Zuko from “Grease,” I wrapped the towel around my hair, pinned it shut, and hung around for about 45 minutes to let olive oil work its magic.

So does it work?

Yes! My hair felt absolutely softer, fluffier and more voluminous. At work the next day, Annika even told me, unprovoked, that my hair looked “great.” Downsides? My hair didn’t appear to be one lick shinier and it took lots and lots of shampoo to wash all that just-ate-at-Bertucci’s smell out. Still, the conditioning worked!

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