Hello Ladies

In this collaboration post with the lovely full haired Tonkabelle of Wura’s Secret Hair, we intend to share our top tips that have helped us grow our own hair to our desired length.

As many of you may know, I offer a hair care consultation service. The first session I have with my clients involves me asking a series of questions so that I am able to advise them accurately. One of the questions I ask my clients is; what do you want for your hair or what are your hair goals? Do you want to guess what the number one response is???? Length!!!! is without a doubt the top answer I receive.

The fact is although there are now so many ladies who have grown their hair to their desired goal, there are by far many more who “seem” to have stunted hair growth, still move from one set back to another and generally are not happy with the length and health of their hair.

There are many practices that have helped me turn the state of my hair around. I choose the following top three because they are the ones that were a major change in how I treated my hair.

Three Techniques that Helped me Grow my Hair

Before I get into the three techniques, because I have quite a number of new readers (hey ladies!!!) I have to start by explaining that hair grows longer when we are able to prevent damage and breakage of our existing hair, ie, the hair we have already grown.

What I find is that so many ladies trying to grow longer hair become obsessed with how fast their hair grows. Many don’t realise that what they should be focusing on is caring for the hair they have already grown.   Because no matter how fast your hair grows, if it keeps getting damaged and breaking off you won’t get the long hair you are looking for.  If however you are able to prevent breakage and keep/retain the hair you currently have then with time your hair will get longer. Retention is the key or secret to longer hair.

If you haven’t already please read the section of Hairducation called How To care For Black Hair for general hair care advise that will help you prevent breakage and damage and help you retain/keep your hair so that it grows longer. Off course I share all my own techniques in that section too.

Now if I had to pick three things that really made a huge impact in me retaining/keeping my hair and growing it to its current length it would be the following

1) Reducing Manipulation

Manipulation in this sense can include combing, styling, playing with or generally physically handling your hair.
Black hair is fragile so must be manipulated gently and excessive manipulation should be avoided. Many ladies who have been successful on a hair journey note that they were able to retain more hair when they cut back on unnecessary manipulation because it often leads to breakage. Simply put; leave your hair alone.

Before my hair journey I would comb my hair several times a day…just for fun. I would experiment and change hair styles very frequently. I loved playing with my hair but all that excessive combing and styling was leading to breakage and shorter hair over time. Now I comb my hair once or twice a week max, I avoid experimenting with hair styles too often, instead I experiment with wig styles and extensions rather than my own hair. I basically try to leave my hair alone as much as possible.

2 Reduce the Use of Direct Heat

Direct heat such as blow driers, curling irons or straightners when used regularly dries out our hair internal moisture making it brittle and prone to breakage.
I used to wash and condition my hair often prior to my hair journey but I would blow dry it on very high heat settings every single wash day, I would style my hair using curling irons several times during the week, sometimes daily.
Now I avoid direct heat as much as possible and only use indirect heat (heat from steamers or hood driers when deep conditioning, rollersetting). If don’t have time to air dry my hair I will use a blow drier but only on the cool air setting.

3) Moisturising and Sealing

Surprisingly, before my hair journey I was aware of many good hair care practices, I simply ignored them because I didn’t think they made an actual difference.
Moisturising and sealing however was a practice I had never ever heard of before my hair journey. I would apply leave in conditioner to my hair on my wash day and nothing else until my next wash two weeks after. My hair was always dry and brittle and if it began to break badly I would apply a hair grease.

Hair that is well hydrated will have good elasticity which helps it fight breakage.  Black hair tends to be drier than other hair types and needs our help to stay hydrated and fight breakage. We do this by moisturising and sealing our hair regularly.

Prior to my hair journey I never EVER moisturised and sealed my hair. When I started my hair journey my hair was in such a bad state I had to moisturise and seal twice a day. As my hair became healthier ot retained moisture better and I began to moisturise and seal once a day. Now because my hair is in quite good shape I moisturise and seal every other day.
The other practices which I know also contribute to me retaining my hair length is protective styling and moisture/protein balancing.  I hope you have been encouraged by this blog post.

Don’t forget to go check out Tonkebelle’s tips on how she retains her hair on her blog Wura’s Secret Hair.

I relaxed my hair on 20^th March and if you follow me on Instagram you may have seen some of pictures of my results already but I have loads more to share as well as all the things I learned from my 6 months stretch.

I hope you’ll be back soon.

x

Lade

I believe there are two ways to learn from other people.  You can learn from what a person has done right and you can also learn from the mistakes they have made.
In this post, I will set out some of the mistakes I’ve made over the years on my hair journey.

Mistakes I’ve Made With Research

I’ve said time and again that I spent 3 months researching before I officially started my hair journey. The key mistake I made at the beginning of my journey was that I ignored some aspects of the research.
For instance, I carried on using sulphate shampoos. I thought that since I would be deep conditioning afterwards, the harshness of the sulphates on my hair would be overridden.
Also I carried on blow drying with heat. I thought surely heat once a week can’t be that bad.
However, I noticed a vast difference in how my hair felt and progressed when I cut out direct heat and switched to sulphate free shampoos.

Mistakes I Made With Technique

I did not review and update my techniques as I progressed on my hair journey.
Up to when I was APL, I could wash my hair without putting it in braids.  When my hair got longer,  it would tangle badly on wash days.  Rather than reviewing my regimen,  I  would spend hours detangling my hair. However when I started to lose more hair than I was comfortable with  I was had to re-evaluate the situation. I realised that the only thing that had changed was the length of my hair.
I did a little research and quickly learned that longer hair tends to tangle more than shorter hair on wash days and that a way to overcome this was to wash it in box braids (calabar). I tried it out and it worked like a charm.
Ladies as you progress on your hair journey,  when a product or technique is no longer working for you; review, regroup and carry on.

Mistakes I Made With Products

There are two mistakes I made with hair products.

1)The first is that I did not give some products enough chance. I gave up on them and later realised that I had been using them incorrectly, eg, using too much or too little of the product.

2)The second mistake I made with products is that I gave up on products that worked well on my hair because they contained some ingredients I was trying to avoid like mineral oil and petroleum.
I switched from a conditioner that contained them to one that didn’t. The new one did not seem to work for my hair so I tried other conditioners that didn’t contain petroleum or mineral oil. Again they just didn’t seem to do much for my hair, so I went back to my Motions Moisture Plus which seems to keep my hair happy even though it contains some ingredients I am not too keen on.
My advice when it come to products is this: always try the products that are mineral oil and petroleum free first, if they are not working for you and you have a product that works for you but contains mineral oil/petroleum,  you can go back to using it BUT keep an eye out for a better product, ie one that doesn’t contain such ingredients and works well on your hair.

Mistakes I Made With Styling

When my hair was shorter there were so many cute protective styles I could have rocked but didn’t because I was too focused on growing longer hair. Now when try to create some of those styles it doesn’t look quite right.

Mistake I Made About Black Hair

Early on in my hair journey, I thought that when my hair became long and healthy I would be able to do all the things you aren’t supposed to do to black hair.
I thought I would be able to use a curling iron every day, and leave it down all the time and comb it till my hand ached. For some reason I thought being successful on a hair journey would give me a licence to do all these things to my hair.
Healthy black hair is still BLACK HAIR!
Healthy black hair (relaxed or natural) is still delicate, cannot tolerate heat abuse, must still be handled with care and protected.  Being on a hair journey will not turn the hair you grow to Brazilian, Peruvian or hair of another race.

The point of hair journey (in my opinion) is that at last, all the myths about black hair can be set aside and we as black women LEARN to give our hair what it needs.

So if you are natural, be aware of what your hair needs and how to take care of it.
If you are relaxed,  learn what relaxed hair needs and how to take care of it.
The same applies to ladies with coloured or locked hair.

Off course their are black ladies out there who wash their hair with anything and always wear it down and don’t even deep condition but still have butt length hair. These ladies are exceptions, I think we all no too well what happens to a lot of us when we don’t care for our hair.

I hope you  learn something from my mistakes.
Happy hair journey ladies.

X

Lade

Learn | Change | Grow.