How Hard Water Affects Your Skin and Hair

Hard water contains high levels of calcium and magnesium. Those minerals occur naturally, but their concentrations in the water supply vary from place to place. Hard water can affect your home’s plumbing, as well as your hair and skin. These are some signs that you might have hard water.

How Hard Water Can Affect Your Skin

The minerals in hard water can dry out your skin. If you already have a condition that affects your skin, such as eczema, hard water can make it worse. 

After you bathe or wash your hands, minerals that are left behind on your skin can absorb some of its natural oil. That can throw off the pH in your skin and cause acne. 

How Hard Water Can Impact Your Hair

Your scalp produces oil that protects and hydrates your hair. Washing with hard water can dry out your scalp and make it feel itchy. Hard water can also make your hair dry, brittle, frizzy, difficult to manage, and likely to break. 

If you dye your hair, washing it with hard water can lead to discoloration and fading. That means you’ll need to have your colored more frequently than you should to maintain the look that you want.

Hard water makes shampoo more difficult to lather, less effective, and harder to rinse out of your hair. You’ll probably use more shampoo than you ordinarily would and still feel like your hair isn’t clean. The shampoo will leave behind a residue on your hair and scalp.

How to Deal with Hard Water

If you’ve experienced these sorts of issues, it’s likely that your home has hard water. A sample can be tested to check for high levels of minerals. 

If you do indeed have hard water, there’s a simple solution. A water softener can reduce the levels of calcium and magnesium in your water and alleviate skin and hair problems. Installing a water softener can also improve the taste of your water, make it more suitable for drinking and cooking, and protect your plumbing from damage.

A technician from Tri-County Water Services can collect a sample for testing and find out if hard water is responsible for the problems you’ve been having. If so, we can install a water softener. Call us today at (610)857-1740 to learn more.