The Abbey Yung Method: The Viral 11-Step Routine, Explained

If your hair is colored, chemically treated, or heat-stressed, start before water ever touches it. Work a bond-building or strengthening treatment through dry or barely-damp lengths and let it sit for about ten minutes. Applying it to dry hair matters: strands that aren't already swollen with water leave room for the active ingredients to absorb into the damaged areas where they're actually needed.

Roughly twenty minutes before you wash, smooth a lightweight oil such as argan, jojoba, or a coconut blend from mid-length to ends. This is classic pre-poo logic: the oil partially fills the outer layer of the hair so the shampoo that follows strips away less of your own moisture, and it dramatically reduces the tangling and breakage that happen when dry hair first meets water. Keep it off the scalp if your roots run oily.

Your first lather should be a clarifying shampoo, used roughly once a week rather than every single wash. Its only job is to dissolve the residue ordinary shampoo leaves behind: hard-water minerals, silicone buildup, leftover styling product, and trapped oil. A genuinely clean scalp is the foundation the rest of the routine sits on, and skipping this is the most common reason later steps quietly underperform.

This is the first of the three non-negotiable steps. After clarifying, or on its own on an ordinary wash day, massage a gentler, non-clarifying shampoo into your scalp rather than your lengths. If you deal with itch, flaking, or irritation, this is exactly where a medicated or scalp-treatment shampoo belongs. Focus on lifting sweat and sebum at the roots, and let the suds clean the lengths as they rinse out.

For damaged or fragile hair, a quick strengthening step between shampoo and conditioner buys real resilience. Squeeze the excess water from your ends, concentrate the treatment on the most worn sections, and give it a minute or two to work. Think of it as reinforcing the weak points before you flood the hair with moisture in the next step.

The second non-negotiable: never finish a wash without putting moisture back. Reach for a standard rinse-out conditioner on a normal day, or swap in a richer mask when your hair feels dry, rough, or over-cleansed. Apply from the mid-length down, comb it through for even coverage, and let it sit a little longer than feels necessary before rinsing.

Out of the shower, on towel-dried hair, an optional leave-on treatment locks in the work you just did. If you used a two-part bond system, this is where its final stage goes. Give it the wait time printed on the label, usually around ten minutes, before you layer anything else on top.

Now move into protection. A leave-in keeps hair hydrated and easy to comb all day, and a heat protectant is essential before any blow-dryer or hot tool. Abbey favors a spray leave-in over a cream, serum, or oil for a practical reason: a fine mist spreads evenly and makes it hard to overload one section, while creams tend to pile up wherever your hands land first.

The third non-negotiable step is simply styling your hair the way you actually wear it, whether that's a volume spray and a blow-dry, a curl cream and a diffuser, or air-drying with nothing fancy at all. The framework deliberately refuses to prescribe one styling routine, because adding volume to fine straight hair and defining a coil pattern are completely different jobs that need completely different products.

To finish, a small amount of serum, lotion, cream, or oil seals the surface, smooths flyaways, and adds shine. Less is more here: start with under half of what you think you need and add only if the ends still look thirsty. On curls this is also the moment to encourage clumps; on straight hair it's mostly about gloss and frizz control.