6 Tips for length retention on your natural hair journey
Photo credit: @liveclothesminded
We are inundated daily with messages from readers pleading for help, questioning why their hair isn’t growing. Many are under the assumption that their hair just isn’t growing. The true issue may be that you’re simply not retaining any of your hair growth. What may actually be happening is that the hair is breaking off at the same rate that it is growing. The out come is hair that appears to stays at one length. Even more daunting, your hair may be breaking faster than it is growing and your hair may start to appear shorter. Before you go ahead and rip out the hair you have manage to save out of frustration, we have noted 6 tips for you to retain more length on your hair journey.
1. Re-evalute your current regimen It’s imperative to evaluate how you are currently treating your hair. Be honest with yourself, could you be putting a little more effort into tending to your tresses? Do you even have a regimen or routine you follow? Building a regimen that is based off of what your hair needs can really help you to keep on top of the health of your hair
2. Use Less Heat: Heat can definitely be beneficial in terms of cutting down the drying time of some of your favourite hairstyles. This is especially true when you are short on time and have an important event to get to. However, you may want to use these appliances sparingly. The worst thing you want to experience in your quest for longer locs is heat damage hair. This damage will be characterised by issues such as dryness, split ends and breakage which will ultimately result in less length being retained.
3. Regular trims: This one may seem a bit counter-productive, but trimming your hair every so often will mean you are removing split and dead ends. These split ends have the potential to continue causing damage right up the hair shaft resulting in more hair loss. In this case if you are suffering from damaged ends it may be more productive to trim those early on before they become worse as this hair loss stemming from the damaged ends will negatively impact your length retention.
4. Protective & Low Manipulation: Protective styles are those which keep your hair, especially your ends, exactly as the term suggests, protected. Keeping your ends out of the way will definitely be a useful tool to use in order to maximise the amount of length you have. Whether your aim is to conceal your hair from harsher environmental elements or simply to minimise the amount of rubbing the ends of your hair does on clothing and other material, protective styling is one avenue that is worth pursuing. Examples include wigs, weave, braids, updos and buns. It is important to note that you need to take care of your own hair underneath in order to maintain the health of your hair.
Slightly different from protective styling, low manipulation hairstyling can also be a great option. These are those which do not require you to consistently style your hair on a daily basis. This is perhaps most handy for those suffering from ‘hand in hair’ syndrome as it allows you to have a hairstyle which requires little manipulation on your part, thus reducing hair loss that may come from over manipulation. Hairstyles to try include braid outs, twist outs, bantu knots, puffs and pin ups. Experiment to find which one your hair responds well to. Most importantly, these types of styles look great while maximising your length retention
5. Moisturise & Seal or L.O.C – Utilise techniques such as Mosturising & sealing or the L.O.C method which are ways to retain moisture in the hair for longer period of time. Now I will not go into too much detail in this particular post, but will make separate post on these individual techniques at some point. Using these techniques as well as keeping more moisture in the hair, can create a barrier between your hair and the external environment. Be sure to pay special attention to your ends as this is where most of your breakage ill occurs.
6. Condition! Condition! Condition! Finally, do not skimp out on conditioning your hair, whether this is to introduce more protein or moisture. Set up a schedule to condition your hair or pay close attention to its needs so that you can execute the appropriate treatment that your hair is craving. This is due to the fact that breakage you experience may be from your hair being too dry or too weak. Heck, your hair may be dry AND weak. This has direct implications on the amount of hair loss you may experience.
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