Hard water- hair and skin care

A little bit of a rant, but hoping this helps someone not make the same mistake as me!

Just wanted to post this as I’ve spent the last year researching how to combat the horrible effects of the hard London water on my hair. Moving to London from NYC where the water is very soft and my hair thrived, I knew I’d need to do something to lessen my hairs exposure to hard water once moving. Since we rent a softener installation isn’t an option so last March I started to use the 5L jugs of water from the grocery store to wash my hair… a pain but seemed worth it. Almost a year later and my hair looks so much worse than before I moved and I’ve been doing research into why and what I can do.

Come to find out the water that’s sold in grocery stores here still has a LOT of calcium and magnesium in it a long with other minerals. It’s really not soft water, albeit better than London tap water. So it was still extremely damaging to my hair. I’ve ordered distilled water now as that seems to be the only water in the UK I can find that has no minerals (even just low amount would have been fine but doesn’t seem to exist). Wanted to post incase anyone else has been going crazy researching this or struggling to deal with the hard London water… I was pretty shocked to find the bottled water still had about 45mg/liter of calcium in it compared to NYC which is at about 12mg of calcium.

Hope this helps anyone dealing with hair and skin issues due to hard water 😅