Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Detangle. Wash. Work It. For Natural Hair

Our hair can be very brittle
The natural hair girl's nightmare is hair breakage- fact. Well, I suppose not exclusively. I look back on my relaxed hair days and remember lamenting my fragile hair. Ill-informed individuals say things like, "African hair grows slower than other races'." That's actually not true at all. Our hair grows just as fast as other races' hair. When it comes to gaining length, we have two impediments: the fragility of our hair and its extreme tendency to tangle. If you've read my "Leave in that Leave-In Conditioner" blog post, you remember me alluding to moisture not always reaching the ends of our strands. Consequently, our hair is often brittle. We have trouble gaining length because we are frequently breaking hair faster than it grows back. Oh yes, we live in a give and take world, and there is rarely a balance.

Wash regularly. It feels and smells
 amazing!
Washing hair is a crucial part of maintaining healthy hair. It's time to shatter the myth perpetuated in some African communities that washing your hair too often leads to significant breakage because it dries your hair. That myth was started before the age of moisturizers and leave-in conditioners. A good head of hair is washed at least once a week (no exceptions). I wore weaves one year in my life, freshman year of college, and I still stuck to the "once a week" rule even if it meant my weaves were short-lived. Dirty hair stinks and a mass of artificial hair on top of it isn't going to change that.

Fortunately for you natural belles, you're not worried about losing that bone-straight, relaxed look by hydrating your hair. You are rocking your natural curls! However, washing your hair (the right way) still takes more time and effort than extending your hair's dry spell. It is worth it though. Below, I have outlined the things you must incorporate into your hair washing procedure to avoid unnecessary breakage (sadly, some will always happen but mitigate is the key):



Divide that hair into sections as you detangle, twisting
the sections as you go

  1. Detangle your hair thoroughly before washing it! There are countless reasons this is the first point. Firstly, skipping the process will worsen any knots you have in your hair. The worse the knot, the more time needed to eliminate it later, the more hair broken eliminating it and, worst case scenario, you may have to use the sheers. If you are using scissors to deal with your knots, you have let those knots run wild. Heed my warning! Now, detangle your hair in sections and once a section is complete, twist it and hold it in place with a clip of your choice (avoid death-grip clips). I recommend olive oil or coconut oil to give your hair slip as you detangle. That really helps. If you are going to use a comb, use a wide-tooth comb. I usually detangle with my fingers and use my wide tooth to finalize the process. 
  2. Wash the hair in the sections you made while detangling. One step at a time, as the saying goes. Its in the shower where you can completely undo all your hard work detangling and that is why this point is important. I remember my naive days of detangling before washing, going into the shower and scrubbing one big afro, coming out and spending two hours detangling again. Sections are your friend. With your twists and clips still in place, choose one to undo, apply shampoo in the same direction as your hair grows (don't just grab it like a loufah!), rinse it, twist it while you are still under the water and clip the end. Once the shampooing is done, condition in the same way, only don't rinse the shampoo out before re-twisting. You want the head of conditioning twists to sit for at least 15 minutes. This is usually when I watch a bunch of Youtube video- you know the kind of videos that make you lose brain cells. Use that time to do something, don't just sit there. Cover your head in a shower cap and pamper yourself in some other way. This conditioning period really helps moisturize your hair. If you are serious about growing good natural hair, it is no longer enough to conditioner, scrub your body and then rinse hair and body at once. You may kill two birds with one stone but one of them won't be worth very much. Once the waiting period is over, thoroughly rinse out the conditioner. Yes, that means undo twists and redo them. 
  3. Leave in that Leave-in Conditioner. This is where you score the brownie points. Once you have padded your hair till it is damp. Undo one twist at a time and add a reasonable amount of leave in conditoner and a morsel of the natural oil you use to seal it in. Twist that section back and if you tie the very tip of your twist with a small hair elastic, that will not only hold the twist in place as your hair dries, it will also stop your ends from frizzing. The hair elastics can be substituted with metal snap clips, which I prefer. Then let that hair air dry.   

Do as you please as you wait for the hair to condition
When you undo your hair it should be stretched and the twists will give your hair some bouncy curls. That is, unless you rake through the strands with a fine tooth comb the second it is done drying. Naturally, this is a long process. I recommend doing it on a day you have off work or school and start in the morning to give you hair enough time to dry. You should not be undoing your twists before the hair is dry. In addition, dividing your twists into more sections than you used for washing will speed up the drying process. Think back on your elementary science classes, when you were shown how surface area helped accelerate evaporation. 

Washing the right way is a painstaking process. I will admit that willingly. However, as your hair lengthens you can use fewer sections for the shampooing/conditioning steps. Eventually, you will be able to pull off four sections. Still discouraged? Well, let me leave you with this: there's a price for beauty are you willing to pay it? 

    

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