Frame & Thread
Caring for your extensions
Make every day a great hair day
Modern Love & I Think I Love You
The single biggest factor in how long your extensions stay healthy and beautiful is you — and this guide is everything you need to make them last.
Frame & Thread is made from premium Slavic remy hair, prized for its lightness, movement, and butter-soft texture. We leave the cuticle intact for longer life and minimal tangling while remaining 100% silicone-free.
That lightness is the whole point, and it rewards the right routine. Even if you’ve worn extensions before, a few things here are worth knowing.
A salon-quality product labeled “safe for extensions” only means it’s free of the ingredients that cause damage — and that isn’t enough. Your hair needs active hydration: products that nourish it so it lasts longer and always looks its best. Your stylist can recommend the right ones.
Start here
Which extensions do you have?
Choose yours, and we’ll build a care guide just for you. Not sure? Your stylist will know.
Hair Care for Extensions
The trouble with silicone
Non-water-soluble silicone gives quick shine, then quietly builds up — drying the hair, weighing down your extensions, and turning to damage over time.
A shortcut ingredient
Silicones wrap the strand in a thin film that reads instantly as smooth and shiny, which is why they turn up everywhere from shampoo to styling cream to heat protectant. In small amounts that film mostly wears away. The trouble is concentration and repetition.
The catch most people miss
Silicone only rinses out with a real, sulfate shampoo. The gentle, sulfate-free shampoos so many people have switched to can't lift it — so a little more is left behind every single wash. Even a sulfate shampoo doesn't always get it all. Either way, layer by layer, it builds.
Where it goes from here
From there it follows a predictable path — and there's a point on that path where the damage can no longer be undone.
It builds in stages — and one is a cliff
Buildup never announces itself. It creeps in wash by wash, and by the time it's obvious it's well underway. Catch it in the gold stages and it comes back. Cross into the pink ones and it's gone for good.
An invisible film deposits with every wash and product. Nothing looks wrong yet.
The film blocks moisture from reaching the strand. Hair feels dry and tangles more, even with conditioner.
The layers scatter light instead of reflecting it. Hair looks flat and lifeless — and greasy even when freshly washed.
Starved of moisture, the fiber stiffens and stops bending. It snaps instead of flexing.
Strands break and split under normal brushing and styling. On extension hair there's no new growth to replace what's lost — the damage is final.
Reading the ingredient list
The two sides sound alike. Here's which is which.
- Dimethicone
- Dimethiconol
- Cetyl Dimethicone
- Cetearyl Methicone
- Stearyl Dimethicone
- Stearoxy Dimethicone
- Behenoxy Dimethicone
- Amodimethicone
- Trimethylsilylamodimethicone
- Bis-Aminopropyl Dimethicone
- Phenyl Trimethicone
- Caprylyl Methicone
- Trisiloxane
- Trimethylsiloxysilicate
- Cyclomethicone
- Cyclopentasiloxane
- Dimethicone Copolyol
- PEG-12 Dimethicone
- Lauryl PEG/PPG-18/18 Methicone
- Any PEG- or PPG- prefixed silicone
The one-second test
See PEG or PPG in the name? Water-soluble — fine.
No PEG/PPG? Treat it as a coating silicone and avoid it.
Don't be fooledStearoxy and Behenoxy Dimethicone are widely listed online as "water-soluble." They aren't — neither carries a PEG or PPG group, so both coat the strand like the rest. Dimethiconol is sometimes called fine "every few washes," but it still needs sulfates to remove and builds up quickly. We treat all three as coating silicones.
Read closelyDimethicone Copolyol (water-soluble — fine) is one letter from Dimethicone Copolymer, a vague term with no PEG/PPG — treat that one as a coating silicone. And PEG-8 Dimethicone rinses clean while plain Dimethicone coats — same family, opposite behavior.
Heat seals it in
Here's the trap: silicone is the most common heat-protectant ingredient. Its film does shield the strand — but it also traps heat against the hair and masks the feeling of damage while it's happening. The hair feels smooth and protected even as the cuticle underneath is being cooked, so the harm surfaces later, all at once.
Flat irons and dryers then bake the buildup into a tougher, more stubborn film that's even harder to wash out — and some silicones are engineered to cross-link under heat, setting harder by design. Once it's heat-set into the fiber, the buildup is there to stay.
Why extension hair feels it most
No scalp, no second chances
Your own hair survives some buildup because the scalp keeps rescuing it — sebum re-oils the shaft, the roots stay hydrated, and new growth pushes damaged sections down to be trimmed away. Extension hair is cut off from all three: no oil, no hydration from the root, no regrowth. Whatever lands on the fiber stays on it, buildup only compounds, and the damage is permanent — there's no new hair coming to replace what breaks. And you can't aggressively clarify extensions the way you would your own hair, so the residue has nowhere to go.
Fine hair shows it sooner
Fine, soft hair with a delicate cuticle is the most coveted texture there is — and silicone works directly against what makes it special. The lightness and movement are the whole point, so a coating that weighs the strand down takes away exactly what you chose it for.
Because a fine strand carries less mass — roughly half the diameter of a coarse one — the same film is a far bigger share of its weight. Buildup dulls the shine and flattens the movement sooner than it would on heavier hair. Keeping it silicone-free is simply how you protect what makes fine hair beautiful: the way it moves, catches the light, and feels weightless.
Already have buildup?
Caught early — while it's still dryness and dullness — a clarifying (sulfate) shampoo plus deep hydration can bring hair back over a few washes. Once it's brittle and breaking, nothing reverses it. On extension hair you can't clarify aggressively, so the surest move is prevention: choose products that pass the PEG/PPG test and the buildup never starts.
We don't put silicone on our extension hair.
You shouldn't either.
Solubility is the right axis for buildup. A few of these — the amino silicones especially — are defended elsewhere as targeted, low-accumulation conditioners. This is the Frame & Thread standard for extension hair, where we choose zero buildup over a moment of slip.
Frame & Thread
Hair Care for Extensions
Why sunscreen can stain your extensions
It’s not quite the myth you’ve heard — and the real reason tells you exactly what to look for on a label.
It’s not really about the dye reacting
You may have heard that sunscreen “reacts with the dye” in extension hair. That’s close, but not quite right — and the real explanation is more useful, because it tells you what to actually check for.
Most extension color is a specialty dye engineered to minimize fade and fade on-tone: the pigment itself is built around a trace mineral compound, which is what gives it that durability.
One ingredient pulls that mineral loose
Avobenzone, one of the most common sunscreen ingredients, is very good at binding to trace minerals — that’s just part of its chemistry. Given enough moisture and time, it can pull that mineral right out of your extension’s color.
That single event does two things at once: it disrupts the color underneath, which is the shift you notice, and the freed mineral — now attached to avobenzone instead — forms a new reddish stain that settles into the hair. It’s really one reaction, not two.
Why your own hair won’t stain
Your natural hair doesn’t carry that same trace mineral, so there’s nothing for the avobenzone to bind to. That’s the real reason this shows up on extensions and essentially never on natural hair — even hair that’s just as light or porous.
Stick with mineral sunscreen
Zinc oxide and titanium dioxide sunscreens don’t contain avobenzone, so there’s nothing for this reaction to start with. That’s the simplest, most reliable protection — check the ingredient list rather than the marketing on the front of the bottle.
A newer option, with a catch: A sunscreen ingredient called bemotrizinol was just approved in the US. It won’t stain your hair — but it’s usually paired with avobenzone in the same bottle, so the label still needs a full check. Mineral sunscreen remains the reliable choice for now. Read the full breakdown →