My Hair Behaves Differently in Every Country I Live In
Here is something nobody warns you about when you move abroad. Your visa situation, your bank account, your ability to say “I would like a coffee” without sweating — sure, people warn you about those.
Nobody mentions that your hair is going to become a completely different substance.
I have had four distinct heads of hair in my adult life and I have not once changed my genetics. Montreal hair. Southeast Asia hair. Post-India hair. And now, nine years deep, Berlin hair. Same head. Four entirely different negotiations.
For years I assumed this was me doing something wrong. Wrong products, wrong technique, wrong everything. It turns out it was mostly geography, and once I understood that, I stopped buying things at random.
- Nothing here is sponsored gospel — it’s just what I’ve worked out the hard way, in four countries, mostly by getting it wrong first.
It was never my hair. It was the water.
This is the big one and it took me embarrassingly long to figure out.
Water is not the same everywhere. It carries dissolved minerals picked up from whatever rock it moved through, and the amount varies enormously by city. The USGS classifies water as soft below 60 mg/L of calcium carbonate and very hard above 180 mg/L — a threefold difference between one tap and another.
That is not a small variation. That is a different washing experience entirely.
Soft water: shampoo lathers instantly, rinses clean, hair feels light. Hard water: shampoo barely foams, minerals deposit on the hair shaft, and you end up with that faintly coated, slightly dull, never-quite-clean feeling that no amount of extra washing fixes.
I grew up on soft water and had absolutely no idea I was living in easy mode.
The leave-in conditioner for frizzy hair that finally made sense
Southeast Asia is where the wheels came off. Two years of humidity and my hair developed opinions I had never seen before.
There is real science here, which I found weirdly comforting. Research on humidity and hair describes how higher humidity increases water uptake, swelling the hair fibers, which extends the cuticle scales and increases friction between strands — producing static and visibly more volume.
So the frizz is not a personal failing. It is water molecules physically getting inside the hair and pushing the cuticle open.
Which changes what you should be reaching for. My instinct back then was heavy oil and heavy cream, and in 90% humidity that just gave me greasy frizz instead of dry frizz. What actually works is something light that sits on damp hair and slows down how much moisture the cuticle takes in.
Davines makes a milky spray that I now put on towel-dried hair before it air dries, and it does the job I always wanted a leave-in conditioner for frizzy hair to do — which is to weigh precisely nothing while still smoothing things down.
Two rules I wish someone had given me in Chiang Mai. Apply it to damp hair, not dry. And stop touching your hair while it dries, because every time you do you are lifting the cuticle again.
Goa, and the thing the sun does that I ignored for years
I went to India for yoga teacher training and came home with hair that felt like straw, and I blamed the water. It was partly the sun.
UV genuinely degrades hair. A study on photo-damage describes how UV-B breaks down the disulphide bonds in keratin, the protein that gives hair its strength, while UV-A degrades melanin and fades color. Both oxidize the lipids that keep hair smooth and holding moisture.
Translation: months of Indian sun quietly dismantled the outer layer of my hair while I was busy feeling spiritual about it.
I do not wear a hat as often as I should. I have at least learned to accept that a scarf on a beach day is not vanity, and that hair which has spent three months in strong sun needs different treatment from hair that has spent three months in a Berlin winter.
Berlin, ten years in, and the hardest water of my life
And then I moved here, and my hair changed again.
German tap water is famously mineral-rich. The relevant chemistry is not complicated: hard water is water high in dissolved calcium and magnesium, and some of that hardness is temporary — meaning it can precipitate out — while some is permanent and only removable through softening or ion exchange.
Those minerals do not vanish when you rinse. They build up on the hair shaft, and the effect accumulates over weeks, which is why moving cities feels like your hair is slowly changing character rather than switching overnight.
What I noticed here specifically: less frizz than Asia, but more dullness. Flatter. Product not absorbing properly. Color fading faster than it should.
Berlin winters add a second problem, which is indoor heating. Dry radiator air pulls moisture out of hair the same way it wrecks your skin, so you are dealing with mineral buildup and dehydration at once.
What I actually do now, in any country
I stopped chasing products and started reading the environment instead. The routine is deliberately boring.
Find out what your water is. Most municipalities publish it. Two minutes of searching explains more than a year of trial and error.
Match the fix to the problem. Humidity means seal the cuticle and use something light. Hard water means clarify occasionally and follow with an acidic rinse. Sun means cover up and repair afterward. These are not interchangeable.
Give it six weeks. Hair does not adjust to a new city overnight, and neither does a new routine. I have thrown out perfectly good products because I judged them at week two.
Travel with one thing, not five. Whatever handles your specific worst-case scenario. For me that is the frizz, so that is the one bottle that gets carry-on space.
Stop blaming yourself. This is the actual lesson. Your hair is not being difficult. It is responding rationally to a completely different chemical environment, and once you know which environment you are in, the whole thing gets much less mysterious.
Four countries in and I finally get it. Not because I found the miracle product, but because I stopped expecting the same routine to work in Montreal, Chiang Mai, Goa and Berlin.
HAS YOUR HAIR CHANGED WHEN YOU MOVED? TELL ME I’M NOT ALONE.
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Amélie is a health and wellness junky. Certified yoga instructor with Yoga Alliance in the Vinyasa and Ashtanga styles, she has a Yoga Instructor Certification – Level I (300 hours) and Yoga Instructor Certification – Level II (200 hours) under her belt. She also has a certified Open Water Diver certification with PADI and SSI Scuba Schools International Freediving Level I certification with SSI Scuba Schools International. She’s been vegan for over 15 years and is obsessed with anything wellness-related.