At the beginning of my natural hair care journey I have NO clue about the concept of moisture/protien balance. All I knew about was deep conditioning so i attempted to do so without any rhyme or reason. I did two DCs within the span of a week and a half that caused major setbacks and led to me chopping off about 5 inches
1) was protien overload! I used hair Mayonaise and added a raw egg and let it sit on my hair for 3 hours
crazy I kno!
At the time I was doing wet cornrow outs daily and after that treatment my end were litterally snapping off
2) next week I decided to fix what I thought was "dry" hair...didnt realize it was protien overload....So I did an overnight DC... that left me with soggy hair and my ends continued to snapp off.
The next week I went to my beautician for my usual flat iron and "I" felt my ends were see through [they werent, yes there was some breakage but as I look at pics it wasnt that bad lol]. I probably only need a 1 or 2 inch trim but NOOOO I was feeling depressed and went on you tube and convinced my self I need to do a chop! BUT I had never had a perm so that was kinda dumb now that I think back
...but I cut my then APL hair to neck length by my self with household scissors (mistake!)...can you say split ends!!!!
The beauty in this situation is it led me to do some research on styles for short hair, in my search I found
www.growafrohairlong.com and adopted the crown and glory method...While my hair was in braids I learned about moisture/protein balance, how to detangle properly and I also learned to cut down on manipulation. This helped tremedously because I would litteraly rip out tangles and that topped with those daily cornrow outs were part of the problem
fast forward about 1 1/2 years later I and pretty much APL again but my hair is a lot thicker and healthier than before and i am retainig length.
I encourage any new natural to research hair practices b4 experimenting with a gang of natural products and styles. I was doing too much to my hair in the beginnig but I learned less in more.
My hair would be much longer today if I hadnt made those mistakes but I am glad I learned that lesson and I would hope no one else would make similar mistake in their journey