There may still be a chill in the air, but there’s a clear forecast for spring hair: It’s coming undone. As relaxed silhouettes, bright colors and textured lightweight fabrics paraded down the New York fashion runways, hairstyles also unwound -- think the disheveled glamour of Kristen Stewart, Blake Lively and Sienna Miller. 

“This spring, you’re perfect in a cool pair of jeans, a simple shirt and a beautiful jacket,” says Jeanne Yang, who styles the likes of Keanu Reeves and Katie Holmes, with whom she also designs the fashion line Holmes & Yang. “Your hair should have the same vibe -- like you’re pulled together, but not trying too hard. Nobody wants to look like they’ve just sat in a salon for an hour.”

Hair is getting shorter, cut in long layers just below the collarbone or at the shoulders. Beverly Hills stylist Byron Williams, who tends to the tresses of Selena Gomez and Eva Mendes, has been chopping flowing hair to 2 inches below the collar bone for an “edgier, fresher” take on surfer-girl sexy. Still, says, Lori Morris, senior editor of American Salon magazine, “There’s no big haircut of the season. Curls are relaxed and wild, and ponytails are loose and messy, as if you’ve just played tennis for an hour.” Jamal Hamadi, a favorite stylist of Kirsten Dunst, says come spring he’ll start with a shoulder-length cut that has jagged ends for more natural texture. “You want to look like a messy child,” he says.

Want to get a jump on spring hair? Here’s how to achieve what will be the season’s big four hair trends: 

1. Loose Waves
For this surfer-girl look, start with day-old hair that has some texture and body to it. Dampen your wavy locks with a texturizing spray, then scrunch random pieces while you blow-dry with a diffuser. If your hair is straight, wrap 3-inch chunks around a large-barreled curling iron. Finish with a light-hold hair spray.

2. Messy Braids
The look: braids with attitude. Spritz hair with a texturing spray, then part to the side, letting loose strands fall around the face. Gather hair into a slightly-off-to-one-side ponytail. Braid loosely and secure with an elastic band. Cover the band by winding strands of hair around it. Fasten stray strands with a bobby pin.

3. Textured Ponytails
The ponytails that bobbed down the spring runways were a bit less sleek than usual. With the tails textured and a little bit wild, they were a fetching mix of control and chaos. To get this new hair trend, smooth your hair with a dab of gel, and then brush it into a high ponytail. To texturize the tail, flat-iron hair and then mist it with sea-salt spray. Pull clumps apart for that cool, unkempt, out-at-the-club-till-4 a.m. look.

4. Hot-rollered Hair
For sexy tousled waves, wind haphazard sections of your hair into hot rollers. Leave in for five minutes, then remove and fluff the curls with your hands. If the waves are too voluminous, lightly brush. Place a dab of shine cream onto your palms and work onto the surface of your hair, then mist with a light-hold spray. “I wore hot rollers in my hair as I drove to a wedding,” says Yang. “When I got there, I pulled them out and headed to the party. Everyone kept telling me my hair looked fabulous -- little did they know I’d just styled it in my car!”

Here’s a no-brainer: If you could tweak your beauty regimen to clear the clutter out of your bathroom cabinets, spend less time getting ready in the morning, and trim some dollars from your budget -- all the while helping the environment -- would you be willing to give it a go?

Well, all that’s possible by following a concept we’ve become very familiar with: multitasking. Choosing products that perform double -- or triple -- duty is a way to make your beauty regimen more eco-conscious, says Jenny Rushmore, global sustainability leader for Procter & Gamble’s beauty and grooming division. The three R’s of sustainability -- reduce, reuse, recycle -- is a catchy reminder of what our priorities should be when it comes to cutting back on waste. “What this means is that recycling is what you do after you’ve already reduced and reused,” says Rushmore. “It’s better not to buy bottled water than to recycle the water bottle, and that same idea applies to beauty products. Reducing the number of products you buy is the best place to start a more eco-friendly beauty regimen.”

Here are seven hardworking beauty products you can easily find on your drugstore shelves.

1. Shampoo-conditioners
These two-in-one formulas will help speed up your showers -- saving an average of 5 gallons of water for every minute you cut from your shower time -- and cut down on packaging. Best of all: Now you can find these double-duty wonders in formulas customized to add volume to fine hair, smooth frizz-prone locks or manage curls.

2. Razors With Built-in Shave Gel
All you’ll need to add is water to get your legs silky smooth. As convenient as that is at home, it’s especially helpful when it comes to getting a close shave when you’re traveling. No need to pack the shave cream: Simply toss a razor with a shave gel bar in your toiletry case.

3. Self-tanning Moisturizing Lotions
Add a glow to your skin as you soften and hydrate it -- without the orange streaks that conventional self-tanners can sometimes leave. To maximize multitasking, choose a facial or body formula with SPF 15.

4. Makeup Foundation With Benefits
Slash your beauty budget and your get-beautiful prep time with a foundation that also treats your skin with anti-acne or anti-aging ingredients, such as youth-restoring antioxidants, peptides, retinols and breakout-busters like salicylic acid.

5. Moisturizing Body Washes
Try these lathering marvels and you can step right out of the shower and into your clothes without having to pause to slather on a hydrating lotion. (Okay, a few seconds spent patting yourself dry with a towel is advisable.) Some advanced products also contain anti-aging ingredients that make fine lines less visible by improving skin’s elasticity, tone and texture.

6. Facial and Body Moisturizers With Sunscreen
With broad-spectrum SPF 15 or 30, these lotions provide the daily sun-shielding protection that dermatologists recommend. You can find formulas that are fast-absorbing and have a lightweight texture, so you’ll never be tempted to skip the sunscreen again. In fact, some facial UV moisturizers are so silky they provide the perfect canvas for your foundation, allowing you to skip the primer. Another step saved!

7. Baby Wipes
If these aren’t in your beauty arsenal, they should be. Unscented, hypoallergenic wipes are a gentle, portable and low-priced makeup remover that will baby your sensitive skin. Cold-weather tip: Stash a packet in your purse or toiletry case during cold and flu season so it’ll be within easy reach for on-the-go hand cleansing.

In winter, the combination of indoor central heating with weather that’s bitter cold or soggy wet can turn hair into a frizzy, brittle mess of static, or a dull, limp mop immune to your styling attempts. And that’s on the good days.

Winter hair is so universally vexing that international teams of scientists have studied how hair reacts to varieties of winter weather, indoors and out. In laboratories and in salons, experts are learning how to formulate helpful products and alter styling and grooming routines to counteract cold-weather extremes.

What these pros have discovered is that hair that’s been chemically treated becomes particularly vulnerable to changes in humidity and temperature. According to expert John Gray, author of The World of Hair, your tresses have a built-in conditioning system called the f-layer. This microscopic coating is like a good pair of ski pants for your hair: It makes the strands naturally water-repellent, smooth and silky. Dyes and straightening treatments, however, remove that protective coating.

 “Once that happens,” says Gray, “the ability to control hair’s water content, which is critical to the way hair looks and behaves, is grossly affected.” As a result, a day of snow or rain can make your hair heavy and unmanageable.

Don’t panic: Even damaged hair can regain its youthful luster with the right handling.

Tweak the Way You Shampoo
Hair needs sufficient interior moisture to counteract winter’s dry indoor air and to protect it against cold or humidity outside. Charles Ifergan, a stylist and salon owner in Chicago -- a city with one of the harshest winters in the country -- suggests using a slightly lesser amount of shampoo from December through March to avoid stripping hair of natural oils. “And don’t rinse out the conditioner as hard. It’s OK to leave a little bit in for extra moisture,” he says.

Dial Down the Hair Dryer
When it’s freezing outside, it’s tempting to blast your soaking-wet hair with your blow-dryer on its hottest setting, if only to warm up the bathroom. That’s a fast route to damage. “You basically end up boiling the water inside your hair,” says Gray. Instead, towel-dry your hair, then give it time to dry on its own. When it’s just slightly damp, apply heat-protecting styling products and use your blow-dryer on a medium to low setting.

Don’t Make Hat Hair Worse
Smashing hair under hats and scarves not only flattens your locks, but the trapped heat can cause the scalp to perspire, making the roots feel unclean, says Gray. That flat, greasy hair often leads to more frequent washing and heat styling. Hat hair may be unavoidable, but you can prevent further damage to the exposed dry ends by brushing them gently and making them the first place where you apply conditioner. 

Step up Your Conditioning Routine
“Every couple of weeks, use an intensive conditioning mask,” says Ifergan. And, after you blow-dry you hair, rub a tiny amount of conditioning oil between your palms, then apply it lightly to your hair as a finishing product.

Stop Static
Ultra-dry, cold weather and central heating can increase static electricity so much that hair becomes frizzy and style-resistant. Products with “smart” ingredients, such as polyquaternium-10 in shampoo and stearamidopropyl dimethylamine in conditioner, control static by depositing their helpful molecules only where needed, like on dry ends. Switching from a nylon or synthetic brush to one with boar bristles will also de-electrify runaway strands, says Ifergan.

Curly haired women no longer have to envy their straight-tressed sisters. Today, curly hair -- in all its beautiful textures -- is getting the attention and products it deserves to look its magnificent best.

New research is helping manufacturers develop products that address curly hair’s unique characteristics. For example, French researchers discovered that African hair is drier, slower growing, and more likely to fray at the tips and split lengthwise. Hair care scientists have also determined that the twists and turns of curly hair bend the shaft’s scalelike covering, making strands rough and difficult to control.

For hair that’s curl-luscious, follow this advice from the pros:

ID Your Curl
“Think of texture in terms of how your hair is shaped -- kinky, curly or wavy,” says Anthony Dickey, who operates a New York salon devoted to textured hair and is the author of Hair Rules!: The Ultimate Hair-Care Guide for Women with Kinky, Curly, or Wavy Hair. Kinky hair has the tightest curl pattern and is often frizzy. Curly hair has looser twists and turns, while wavy hair exhibits a softer, more open curl.

Treat Your Dominant Hair Type
You may have curly hair -- but only in a patch at the back of your head. Or maybe your kinky hair calms to a gentler curl along the sides. It’s wise to cater to your dominant type, says Domingo Serquinia, co-owner of Paint Shop, a Los Angeles hair and nail salon. If portions of your hair are curly on an otherwise tame head of hair, Serquinia recommends using a temporary straightener, such as the new keratin treatments that many salons offer. Stylists can moderate the amount of temporary straightener to add manageability to curls, not flatten them. If your hair is kinky rather than curly, skip the keratin and opt for paste-formula relaxers that can be applied precisely to new growth.

Choose a Product Line for Your Hair Type
Curly, kinky and wavy hair need extra hydration because their winding structure impedes the flow of scalp oils along the strand. Product lines formulated for curly hair, including those designed specifically for women of color, contain additional moisturizing ingredients that your thirsty tresses will drink right up.

Don’t Skip Regular Cuts
Curly hair may grow slowly, but it still needs trimming every three months to keep the ends fresh, says Serquinia. But he advises, “You don’t want your stylist to use a razor or cut into the ends, because that can fray ends and add to the frizz.”

Keep Your Curls Cool
If your hair has been processed with chemical straighteners or permanent-wave solutions, steer clear of high-heat styling tools like flatirons, suggests Miami, Fla., dermatologist Heather Woolery-Lloyd. That’s because your hair may already have blisterlike bubbles from the processing, and heat can cause those bubbles to break or split, leading to damaged, distressed locks.

Handle With Care
Because of their lower tensile strength, some types of kinky hair have decreased resistance to repeated brushing, says Woolery-Lloyd. Avoid vigorous brushing and work carefully through knots and tangles to avoid breakage. After shampooing and conditioning your hair, remove wetness with a gentle squeeze. Apply a styling product to still-wet hair to protect the cuticle and retain the hair’s natural curl.

Think Breeze, Not Blast
To get salon results at home, without having to master the tricky two-handed round brush technique, look for a blow-dryer with a wide-tooth comb attachment and use it on a medium setting. Or, suggests Dickey, use an old-school portable hood dryer that lets hair dry in place with minimal tangling. The gentler airflow of the portable dryers is less disruptive to the curl pattern than the typical blow-dryer. Bonus: Your hands will be free to apply your makeup.

You shower, blow-dry, flat iron, moisturize and carefully apply makeup. He runs a comb through his hair and calls it a day.

So, how can you suggest your man step up his get-ready routine without offending him? “This is a big manner minefield that needs to be navigated carefully,” says etiquette expert Thomas P. Farley, editor of Modern Manners: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Social Graces and a contributor to MensLifeToday.com. “It can’t be that you simply don’t like beards; it needs to be presented more gently, with a little humor, like, ‘I love kissing you, but your beard/stubble is chafing my delicate skin.’”

Read on for some grooming tips to share -- ever so sensitively -- with your man.

Shaving Secrets

A few pre-shaving steps are the secret to a great shave, says celebrity men’s grooming expert Diana Schmidtke, who has styled George Clooney, John Travolta and Jon Hamm.

Step one: Open up the skin’s pores. This will take care of itself if your man shaves in the shower; if he doesn’t, he’ll want to apply a warm washcloth to his face for at least 60 seconds.

Step two: Exfoliate gently to remove dead skin cells that may block the blade. He can do this by using a facial scrub or simply cleansing his face with the same washcloth he used in step one.

Step three: Apply a pre-shave oil to moisten skin and soften the hair before lathering up with shaving cream.

Try to observe your man when he’s shaving to see if his technique needs some tweaking. Schmidtke advises men to shave with the grain, taking two short strokes and then rinsing the blade clean to decrease the risk of nicks, razor burn and ingrown hairs.

His Hair: Handle the Hints with Care

Men can be touchy about their hair, as we all know. One common sticky situation: He wants to work out before dinner, but you’ve seen his grungy gym-to-restaurant look. What to do? Schmidtke suggests investing in some dry shampoo. “It will soak up the grease, so his hair doesn’t look stringy,” she says.

An even stickier situation: He’s starting to experience a thinning mane and not at all happy about it. Although you can’t rewire his genetics, you can recommend ways to slow the process down. “Male pattern baldness is amenable to medical treatments,” explains Dr. John Gray, author of The World of Hair Colour. “Rogaine lotion and Propecia tablets both work, and the earlier you start, the better. There are no other scientifically proven treatments.”

He may be tempted to don a cap day and night to hide this thinning hair, but that will only make things worse, causing hair breakage that will make his mane appear even thinner. Vigorously drying hair with a towel can also cause breakage. Instead, he should gently squeeze out excess moisture post-shower and allow hair to air dry.

The right cut is also important. A blunt cut will give the appearance of a fuller head of hair, while texturized cuts will draw attention to thinning patches. If you love the Bruce Willis bald-is-sexy look, you might want to encourage your man to try shaving his head.

Yours Versus His

Sharing is good, but when it comes to your favorite hair-care products, claim your territorial rights. Most men are all about convenience when it comes to grooming, but we hunt down the products that are perfect for our styling needs. In other words, subtly remind him that you’d prefer he didn’t use your favorite shampoo for color-treated curly hair to wash his entire manly body.

“Men and women can theoretically share shampoo products, but women have very different conditioning needs than men,” adds Gray. “They have longer hair that is more likely to be chemically treated, which means it requires higher levels of conditioning.” Finally, there’s the fragrance factor to take into account. Guys don’t want to smell like lavender, and you definitely don’t need to reek of musk. A better solution: his-and-hers hair products.