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Nonie - The
bolded part is not true either. It's just your assumption. I can share an experience about clothes not being able to be cleaned either from certain substances. I went out to eat and spilled melted butter on my capri pants. These capri pants are made out of a stretchy Nylon like material and Polyester I think (I'm at work right now. When I get home, I'll see what type of material it is). Anyway, as soon as we got home, I sprayed Shout on the butter spots, rubbed it in, let it sit for a while, and then I rubbed laundry detergent on the spots and washed the pants in the washer immediately. I put the pants in the dryer and when they came out, you can still see where the butter spots were.
And no, I am not talking like dirt is some large thing that cannot dissolve. Dirt isn't the only thing that could be in your hair or clothes when your hair is not clean. Of course plain ol' dirt from the ground can get out of hair and clothes pretty easily. However, dirt is not the same as grease, butter, oil, thick stuff like that which can be difficult to get out of hair and clothes, even when washing.
And the people you are talking about that can get their hair clean in twists and braids probably do not pile their hair with thick butters, creams, oils, or greases.
Poohbear ^^this just makes my point. It's not about whether the clothes can be cleaned or not; it's about whether the product you are using and your method are adequate enough to get things clean.
In Kenya we have a detergent called Omo. I do not even need Shout to wash butter off clothes. Just warm water and Omo and rubbing the stain directly is enough. I don't put a lot of stock in Shout. We have the wipes at work, and you know how they show on TV that you spill coffee or whatever and it cleans them off. Never worked. What works, is going to the wash hand basin in the bathroom, applying oodles of soap and rubbing stain then running water through the strain and yes, I end up with a wet patch but nothing that paper towels can't dab to make less wet and sometime won't dry to a clean shirt. It has worked on cotton; it has worked on acrylic sweaters that are white. And remember my story about turmeric mask, my woolly cap got clean without shout: just hand soap and water. I don't even have Omo in case you think it's just Omo that works wonders.
Do you know that even car grease can be washed off clothes? I've done it and not with a washing machine. You've got the right products, and you don't just toss it into a machine but aggravate it with your hands, and you can get it clean. Even blood stains come off clothes when I wash them, while I have a friend who'd toss her
drawls when they got stained coz that was an exclamation mark (end of discussion) as far as she was concerned, not an ellipsis.
Clarifying shampoos are made to clean off thick build up. What sort of build up are we talmbout? Oil, dirt, sweat, the works! *I* washed off Vaseline aka grease that was so thick on my hair that it had the color it has in the bottle (white) instead of just being shiny see-through, and I washed it off my twists with no problem. So what you talmbout dirt not being the same as grease. My shampoo cleans both and that's what a good shampoo--and especially a clarifying shampoo--is supposed to do. BTW shampoos and detergents are similar cleaning agents because they are supposed to be that good at cleaning.
The outfit you say that had butter that didn't get clean would still not have gotten clean if it was just frilly strings, because your method or products were lacking in ability to get things clean. Another thing you're not considering is the stuff you are trying to clarify from your hair is stuff that sits on top of strands, not soaks into the cortex of your hair...so even my examples would seem more difficult to "fix" since clothes are made of threads which are woven fibers. If you look at a thread, it looks like a minute twist...so we're talking about stuff soaking into the weaving of the threads and then into the threads themselves and still coming out. When it comes to hair, we're talking about stuff that you applied to hair when twisting and then stuff that got thicker and thicker as you applied to the outside. I KNOW the inside can be cleaned because I understand how soap works. But c'mon now, the outside is a breeze. In fact, it would seem to me that undoing the twists would be making it harder to remove the surface buildup from days of layered moisturizing.
Anyway, y'all do what you do, and I can bet my bottom dollar, you will continue creating problems.
Curlykale, your point about not being able to clean base of twists I pointed out as being the only thing I see that could be difficult with thick twists, especially if done firmly at the base. But unless my twists are braided at the base, they get puffy so the same way I'd be able to reach through an afro to my scalp to massage, is the same way I'd reach between the strands at the base to massage my scalp. Unless you're taking a comb and parting millimeter thin sections over and over again to clean your scalp, I don't see how cleaning the scalp is easier when your hair looks like this:
That's like one giant base of a twist...with hair so compacted that it's a feat to get to scalp easily.
Compare that with this image of big braids:
These are firmly done so yes getting to the scalp looks impossible...but when wet, not only do I find the base loosens, but also the fact that the base is stretched makes for easy penetration to scalp.
When I wash my hair in braids, the only reason I undo to comb through is to remove shed hair and make sure hair is fully detangled. When I apply shampoo, I don't even use an applicator bottle. Just my fingers and I reach inside the base of the braids and massage. I don't do that when my hair is loose. That'd only tangle my hair. I clean my scalp when my hair is braided.
But then again, maybe I've just got mad skills so *shrug*.
The sentence following that statement explained the difference you saw: skinny twists that also felt firm (You said the twist was hard like a rope). That is the point I was making and my reasoning for mentioning that point was so as to point out that a twist that firm would appear as if it'd be hard to clean. Yet when I wet the very same twists that are like that when freshly done, they soften up and feel like socks or a sweater might feel when wet: easy to clean by just squeezing it repeatedly with suds of soap going in and out. I wasn't talking about you washing the twist and noticing a difference while washing. 
No way, no how. ^^THAT is a FEAT I'd have to be held at gunpoint to deal with. I'm even cracking up that I'd be giving myself more work undoing twists unnecessarily. 
