How to Fix & Restore a Damaged Wig? (2025)

When you buy a new wig, it is nice, shiny, and just perfect. However, if you don’t take the time to maintain it, it slowly starts to deteriorate and eventually becomes unwearable. That’s, unfortunately, the faith for all hairpieces that were not cared for, no matter how expensive or high-quality they were. This can happen to both synthetic wigs and human hair ones.

There is a good reason why everyone always repeats how important it is to take proper care of your wig if you want it to look good and last for so long. But before you throw your tangled mess of a wig into the trash, there are some things you can try to revive. Saving a damaged hairpiece is difficult since it takes much hard work and patience. If you want to discover how to restore that shine and glamour to your ruined wig, look at this tutorial.

The first step to saving that tangled mess is detangling. You should be able to take care of it with some patience. We don’t recommend using just any brush, but a professional detangling brush made for wig use. It does a much better job and is safer for the hair.

Place your wig on a Styrofoam wig stand and pin it down. Spray some detangling spray to make the process easier. Start combing from the ends, going higher up, and remember that you have to be extremely gentle and do it slowly. Aggressive combing and pulling will make matters worse, and you’ll end up with a hairpiece that’s in an even worse state than it is. You want to minimize shedding and breakage. Once the wig is completely untangled, you can move on to the next step.

Although it is tangle-free, the wig will still look pretty awful at this point. You will probably notice split ends, dryness, and frizz, but this should be handled with some washing and conditioning. Use a sink or any container and fill it with warm water, not too hot or cold. Add a generous amount of high-quality shampoo that contains keratin. Immerse the hairpiece into the water and gently rub the strands. Please don’t overdo it because you might tangle the hair again.

If the hairpiece is bad, leave it to soak for half an hour. After thoroughly rinsing it, add a leave-in conditioner (we recommend a detangling conditioner or one that restores severely damaged hair) and leave it for at least half an hour or more. Please don’t rush this step because quite some time is needed for the conditioner to work its magic.

After the shampooing and conditioning are done, you can try some additional steps. A reparative treatment is also a good way to restore the strands and make them soft and shiny. There are many brands out there that dodo a good job. Bringing back moisture to the hair is important because that will help the wig look almost like new.

After all of the vital products have been applied, it is time to let the wig dry. Don’t use a blow dryer because that won’t help and might worsen matters. Leave it on the wig stand overnight. Don’t forget to brush the hairpiece while it’s still damp.

Your wig should be in pretty good shape and looking quite good. To make it flawless, you need to style it. Choose the texture you want and either curl or straighten the wig. Always apply a heat protectant and use low to medium heat.

And that’s it; your hairpiece should look good and be wearable again. Remember that this works best on human hair wigs because synthetics are low-quality, and there’s usually no going back once it’s damaged.

Being able to save a damaged wig is great, but the best thing you can do is prevention. If you think about it, taking care of your hairpiece regularly is much easier than trying to revive a ruined one. It is not that hard to maintain a wig. Especially human hair, so make sure to brush, wash, condition, and style it regularly.

If your hairpiece is simply too damaged and you didn’t succeed in saving it, you might want to think about getting a new one. So, check out AiryHair wig collection.