Hey ladies! Long post ahead
It’s been roughly a month of experimenting with styling/stretching methods and how that affects the tangling of my hair. Boy I’ve learned a lot!
The general gist of what I’ve learned is
to achieve the least amount of tangles I need a combination of both stretch and smoothness.
For instance. When I stretch my hair in 8 or less braids, WITHOUT following up with a blow dryer. My results were not very smooth, because I wasn’t able to get enough tension due to the size of the braids vs the length of my hair. I ended up getting some matting/tangles because of this.
On the other hand, when I was doing twists/twist outs my results were very smooth because I was doing many (15-20) twists, but not very stretched, so I still got some tangles.
Best way I’ve found to get stretch AND smoothness : roller sets, or flexi rod sets. But those are time consuming since I’m not very good at them (yet
)
9-10 braids followed up with light blow drying gives a smooth enough stretch and is pretty quick to do (35 mins to braid, 10ish mins to take down and blow dry the next day) but I find it requires too much maintenance during the week, and then I still have to restyle on Thursday if I want to wear my hair out on the weekend.
Next week I’m getting knotless braids (definitely need a hair break after all this experimenting) and I’ll keep those in until the end of April. Once the braids are out I’ll be alternating between roller sets, and my 5 day twists/2 day twist out routine. I’ll be experimenting with the twisting routine to see how I can stretch my ends better to reduce tangling.
On days when I’m tired/don’t want to spend too much time doing my hair it’ll be a quick 9 braid braidnblow out
Feels good to finally have a routine that works with my lifestyle, is safe for my hair, and allows for predictable styling results . I’m now working on finding holy grail products to go with this routine!