How to...take care of your hair in protective styles..

The aim for a lot of  naturals (well for me anyway), is to be able to get that mile high, grand canyon size afro, or for the less gravity defying naturals, a massive curly awesome thing on top of their heads. If that makes sense. Yup, the most important thing is having healthy hair and not putting strange goop that burns your skin on your scalp, but aside from that, a lot of us like the big hair look. Unfortunately, out hair doesn't get like that overnight due to it's slightly fragile nature.

 Ladies and gentlemen, let us, therefore, be upstanding fooooorrrr....(drumroll please)...protective styling! *crowd applauds*.

 I've mentioned this an a previous post, but I thought I'd do another one and concentrate more on different protective styles, and how to take care of your hair whilst wearing them.

The aim of protective styles is to protect the ends of your hair from breakage and splitting by keeping them away from the sun/ wind and otehr natural elements.

Side note: I'm using pictures of my own hair not because I think they're the best examples, but because I don't want any copyright issues from stealing pics from other people's blogs, and it's hard to find celebrities with protective styles sometimes.

1) Twists

These are great, especially because they can be done at lot's of different sizes, and are quicker to put in (in my opinion) than plaits/braids. You can wear twists up, down, casual, fancy, whatever you like. I find twists get messy/ fuzzy more easily than braids though, so washing your hair while in twists might be more difficult if you want to maintain a neater look. Twists that have been in for a week or more can be taken out to make a really great 'twist out' which is a curly, textured fro. My twists that you can see above, are really small, and they can stay in for up to 4 weeks before they start to look shocking.

To take care of twists: Sleep with a satin/ silk scarf at nights. Spray daily with a moisturising spritz, My spriz contains, water, pure vegetable glycerin (you can get this from black hair shops), rose water, and a couple of squirts of condtioner.

2) Braids

 

Braids are similar to twists, but they usually stay in longer, but take longer to put in. Braids can be done large, small or medium size, depending on the look you're going for, and how long you want them to stay in for.

To take care of braids: Sleep with a satin/ silk scarf at nights. Spray daily with a moisturising spritz, My spritz contains, water, pure vegetable glycerin (you can get this from black hair shops), rose water, and a couple of squirts of condtioner.

3)Extensions.

Extensions are great occasionally but the two main problems are :

1) They can dry out your real hair.

2) They can damage your fragile edges and lead to traction alopecia.

My extensions in the picture are Marley Braid extension twists. I did them myself (they're really easy to do guys!) to make sure that I was happy that they weren't too tight, and that I didn't have some crazy hair dresser yanking at my hair with a comb. (there ARE some good  natural  hairdressers out there btw... lemme know if you find one)

To take care of extensions: 

• I always try make sure that I  do the edges loosely and use fairly big sections. I don't advocate micro braids or twists if you're not using your own hair. They can lead to irreversible damage to your edges, asw well as taking forever to put it and take out.

• I redo the edges once once every two weeks. 
•  I spray liberally - very liberally, every couple of days with my homemade spritz that I mentioned about above.

4) Buns

Buns are nice and neat, they make a really quick easy protective style.  The only problem with buns is that the edges of your hair can get damaged by the tension from the buns. 

To take care of buns: Take your hair down at least every two daystoavoid pulling on your hairline, moisturise with a leave in conditioner  and seal with an oil like castor oil, olive oil, or jojoba oil.

Part 2 coming soon.....