How to avoid a detangling disaster
Detangling days can be something some naturals struggle with. Hard. But the irony is, it’s probably the most crucial thing to master if you want healthy and especially LONG hair! Not detangling properly is going to lead to a lot of premature breakage.
Many times, when we run into a problem (or I know I used to do it), like a big hair knot or something, we panick and do everything we can to remove it quickly before it gets worse (like it’s the plague or something), and sometimes we don’t realize that we’re actually hurting our hair more than helping. When you’re just eager to comb through your hair, you’re probabaly neglecting the fact that you may be ripping right through it, causing that premature breakage. And if you aren’t detangling properly, you’re also going to run into that a lot. So here’s 3 things I suggest:
Have a detangle routine
Natural hair care is not something you can “wing”. You have to be very careful and pay attention to what you do in order to keep your hair as long and healthy as you want her. Certain products you use will have an effect on how easy it is to detangle your hair and if you’re providing thorough and daily care to your hair, detangling days will never be a struggle.
This is a good area to experiment in. Some naturals detangle their hair while it’s damp, completely wet or completely dry! It all depends on what works best for them. So it’s important to discover what does work best for you and be consistent with your detangling efforts. Neglect is going to lead to aloooot of hair knots!
Keep hair stretched
We all know the shrinkage is real. Natural hair has the ability to shrink to about 75% of its length! And though that is so beautifully unique, it can cause some issues in the detangling process. I wear wash-and-go’s very often and that style makes it very easy for hair to group together and get tangled.
But when the hair is stretched out, the likelihood of hair getting caught into the groove of another tresses curl pattern decreases a lot. Keeping the hair stretched also helps product distribute down to your ends so hair can stay moisturized and stay soft so we can keep detangling easily. Ba-BAM simple!
Use the right ingredients
You need to be using the right products consistently throughout the week to aid in the outcome of your detangling. If you aren’t taking care of your hair properly, you can’t expect her to cooperate with you because you finally decided to do one thing you were supposed to do. Because if you’re facing a lot of hair knots, you can spritz your hair with water and different products all you want but if the inside of that hair knot is dry, your aren’t going to smoothly remove it. So you must use the right products that work for you.
And here’s the cool thing about natural hair…she changes constantly! You have to be willing to work with her, not force her to work with you. So if she no longer likes the products you’ve been using to help detangle, that doesn’t mean get more aggressive with the comb. That means communicate with her and find something else that will work.
Now I have a cool challenge for you. It’s called the Know Thy Hair Challenge. If you struggle with finding the right ingredients that work for your hair this free challenge is going to be the start you need to end that struggle. Sometimes we take more time to get to know the products that we do our own hair. Remember, you always comes first! So if you’re curious to see what this free challenge is all about, go to thehairpolitics.com/knowthyhair
I hope you learned something today and I’ll see you in the challenge!