To make Short hair special: Build it, grip it, slip it

Short haircuts make for easy-breezy everyday styling, but the flip side of that is it can be trickier to feel special and “swishy” when you fancy it. The trick to giving crops a bit of va-va-voom is twofold – add height to lift and flatter facial features, then a bit of slip to make it sparkle. Begin building volume as soon as you’re out of the shower with a mist of L’Oréal Professionnel Tecni Art Pli, £14.50, all over. This superior styling spray bulks up individual strands without weighing hair down (crucial for short styles – you want airy volume here, not flattening weight). Blow-dry using a small paddle brush, which is much easier to use than those fiddly round ones that invariably get all tangled up. Take sections of hair the width of your hand, hold the brush underneath, then pull the hair taut upwards as you blast from above using a nozzle attachment on your dryer. The tension you create here adds shine as well as volume, then you can dial up the gloss with a good finishing product. Silicones seem to get a bad rap these days, not for any reason I can understand, as they’re still the best way to instantly – albeit temporarily – coat roughed-up cuticles and give hair a lovely slippiness and shine. New and excellent is

Redken Frizz Dismiss Instant Deflate Oil-in-Serum, £29.50,

which adds beautiful softness and stops frizz-causing moisture getting in or out. Or try my old favourite, Percy & Reed Smooth Sealed and Sensational Volumising No Oil Oil, £6, which, true to its name, is not an oil at all but a delicate serum that adds gloss and generally makes hair behave without completely overpowering it into flatness. >>

It’s no surprise healthy hair starts on the inside, and the only supplement I’ve ever managed to stick with is Viviscal Maximum Strength, £29.99. It’s the most clinically researched hair sup on the market, sells a pack a minute globally and counts golden girl of all things good, Gwyneth Paltrow, among its famous fans. Sold.