Pool, AC, and Tap Water: What Else Is Changing Your Hair in Ho Chi Minh City

2026.08.10Hair care

Everyone who moves to Ho Chi Minh City gets the same briefing: it’s humid, your hair will frizz, good luck. And yes, the humidity is real. But if you live the typical expat life here (a serviced apartment or condo with a pool, an office and home that are air-conditioned around the clock, showers in water that isn’t what you grew up with), there are three other things acting on your hair every single day. They get far less attention than the weather, and for a lot of people they matter more.

Each one does something different, how to tell which one is affecting you, and what to change when the products you brought from home stop behaving.

The pool: the one you’re probably underestimating

A pool downstairs is one of the great perks of living here. It’s also, for many residents, the single biggest new stress on their hair — especially if that hair is coloured, highlighted, or bleached.

Condo pools are chlorinated, and chlorine is hard on hair that is in the water several times a week. Regular swimmers often notice their hair feeling drier and rougher, colour fading faster than it used to, and, for lightened or blonde hair, sometimes an unwelcome shift in tone after weeks of laps. None of this is guaranteed to happen to you, but if you swim several times a week and your hair changed after you arrived, the pool deserves a hard look before you blame the climate.

Two habits help, and both are free:

Wet your hair thoroughly with shower water before you get in. The idea is simple: hair that’s already soaked up clean water has less capacity to soak up pool water. Most condo pools have a shower right there — use it on the way in, not just on the way out.
Rinse as soon as you get out. Not after coffee on the sun deck, not after you get back upstairs and answer three messages. The longer treated water sits in your hair as it dries, the longer it has to do its work. A proper rinse immediately after swimming is the cheapest protection there is.

If you swim daily, a swim cap is worth considering, and some swimmers like to work a little conditioner through their hair before putting one on. If you colour your hair, it’s worth mentioning your swimming routine to whoever colours it. It genuinely changes what choices make sense.

Air conditioning: dry air in a famously humid city

This is the one that sounds like a contradiction. You moved to a humid tropical city, so why do your ends feel dry?

Because you don’t actually live in the tropical air. You live in a bedroom, an office, a café, a Grab car, and every one of them is air-conditioned. Air conditioning strips moisture out of the air as it cools, so the environment your hair spends most of its hours in can be dry in a way the weather report never shows. Many people here effectively commute between a sauna and a desert several times a day, and hair doesn’t love either the dryness or the constant back-and-forth.

What tends to help is treating your indoor life, not the outdoor climate, as the main event: don’t wash more often than your scalp actually needs, be a little more generous with conditioner than you were at home, and pay attention to your ends, which are the oldest, driest part of your hair and the first place AC dryness shows up as roughness, static, or split ends.

The water: when your shower feels different, you’re not imagining it

Ask expats here about their shower and you’ll hear a range of experiences. Some notice nothing. Others swear their shampoo lathers differently from how it did at home, or that their hair never quite feels rinsed clean, or that it feels squeaky and stripped instead.

Is the water here “hard” or “soft”? Honestly, it varies. Many residences have their own tanks and filtration, so it can differ from building to building. What we can tell you is that the sensation is common enough that it’s worth taking seriously as a variable. If your hair felt different from your very first week here (before the pool, before any new products, before the routine changed), the water is a reasonable suspect.

Some residents use a filtered shower head; some find it makes a difference, some don’t. It’s an inexpensive experiment if you’re curious, not a necessity.

So which one is it? A quick way to narrow it down

Since all three of these arrived in your life at the same time, it helps to play detective:

Timing. Did your hair change in the first week, before anything else about your routine did? Look at the water. Did it change gradually as you settled into a swimming habit? Look at the pool.
Pattern. Is your hair noticeably worse the day after you swim, and better after a few days away from the pool? That’s your answer. Is it a slow, steady dryness that tracks with long office weeks rather than weekends? That points at the AC.
Where it shows up. Rough, staticky ends with a fine, flyaway feel often go with dry indoor air. Overall dullness, faster colour fade, or a texture change through the lengths after swimming points to the pool.
The lather test. If the same shampoo you’ve used for years suddenly behaves differently — more lather, less lather, a different feel afterwards — that’s usually about the water, not the shampoo.

You’ll rarely get a clean single answer, because these things overlap. But knowing your main culprit tells you where to spend your effort.

When the products you brought from home stop working

It’s a story that will sound familiar to a lot of new arrivals: “I use exactly what I used at home, and it doesn’t work here.” That’s not surprising: your products didn’t change, but everything around them did.

Before you replace your whole shelf, change one thing at a time:

Adjust amounts first. If your hair feels coated, use a little less conditioner or masque than you did at home. If it feels parched, use more, or leave it in longer. The same product at a different dose is the cheapest fix available.
If you swim, fix the swimming routine before changing products. Pre-wetting and immediate rinsing often do more than any bottle can.
If the AC is your culprit, add moisture rather than switching everything. A richer conditioner or a leave-in for the ends often addresses AC dryness without abandoning the routine you know.
If you suspect the water, test it. Notice whether your hair feels different after showering somewhere else: a gym, a hotel, a trip home. If it does, that’s useful information, and a filtered shower head starts to make a lot more sense.

And give each change a couple of weeks before judging it. Hair responds slowly, and changing three things at once tells you nothing about which one worked.

At emo.

emo. Hair Salon is in District 7, on Raymondienne street in the Starhill area, near Crescent Mall and Phú Mỹ Hưng, which puts us right in the middle of the life we’ve just described: condo, pool, air conditioning, and products that behaved differently back home. Both Japanese and Vietnamese stylists work here, and you can request either by name; the “JP” and “VN” on our price list simply indicate which stylist you’ve chosen, not where you’re from. The four Japanese stylists each have at least nineteen years behind the chair, and this climate, indoors and out, is something we work with every day.

We speak English, Japanese, Vietnamese, Chinese and Korean.

You can book by phone or Zalo, or online, though please note the online booking page is in Japanese only, so phone or Zalo is usually easier for English speakers.

Phone: 0707 177 290
Zalo: Message us on Zalo
Online booking (Japanese only): Reservation page

emo. Hair Salon
14 Raymondienne, khu Starhill, phường Tân Mỹ, Quận 7, Ho Chi Minh City (near Crescent Mall, in Phú Mỹ Hưng)
Tue–Fri 9:00–19:00 (last cut 18:00) / Sat–Sun 9:00–18:30 (last cut 17:30) / Closed Mondays