No White Bulb Always = Breakage?

that_1_grrrl

New Member
Every time I wash my hair, I lose hairs. When I apply product to wet hair, I get hairs in my hands. :nono: When I look at these hairs, they never have white bulbs attached to them. I rarely ever see hair with white bulbs attached to them. Could it be that the hair I think is breakage is just shed hair?

If it is breakage, then I can honestly say nothing works to get rid of it: protein treatments, oil rinsing, ayurveda. I am really hoping this is just shedding. :ohwell:
 
I read that sometimes there can be a black bulb instead of a white bulb, and those are still shed hair. :ohwell: Sounds like breakage to me, if there's no bulb at all though.
 
I feel you. :nono:

The best thing to do is try to figure out what's causing it and correct it at that point. I notice that most of my breakage comes from knots. And a lot of my knots come from shed hairs that are wrapping around good hairs and my breaking it off. My only solution is to detangle more often to get the shed hairs out of there before they cause trouble.

Also I've found that manipulating wet hair causes more breakage for me. Now I don't comb or detangle my hair when it's wet. I try not to run my fingers through it wet too much either. I just work with my hair in halves on wash days and try to be as thorough as possible without too much finger-separating beyond that. Sometimes I work in quadrants, but halves work better for me.

Some questions you can ask yourself to figure out what went wrong when you notice broken hairs:

Is your hair dry? Brittle? Hard? What styles are you wearing? Do you comb/brush, and what kind do you use? Do you have tangles? How gentle are you when separating them? Are your nails neat, cut, and not snagging on your hair?

And for us naturals, we wear twists as a protective style and maybe don't think about it, but twists in the back can rub against your clothes, leading to breaking ends; and the ends are still exposed to the elements. Your ends aren't really "protected" in twists. I've started pinning mine up in the back until my hair is long enough where I can tuck them under.
 
I read that sometimes there can be a black bulb instead of a white bulb, and those are still shed hair. :ohwell: Sounds like breakage to me, if there's no bulb at all though.

I was going to say the same thing! I have pigmented or dark bulbs- sometimes I'll have white ones. Mine are definitely shed hairs.
 
I had that problem too! Try a leave in with protein like aphogee or the green tea reconstrutor. What kind of protein treatment have you tried. nexxus emergencee is great. My hair is getting better now. I can use nexxus emergencee without following up with moisture. My hair is strengthening with every treatment. Sometimes when you use a protein treatment and follow up with moisture it can cancel out each other. I learned that from GYMFREAK. Best advice I could have gotton.
 
I feel you. :nono:

The best thing to do is try to figure out what's causing it and correct it at that point. I notice that most of my breakage comes from knots. And a lot of my knots come from shed hairs that are wrapping around good hairs and my breaking it off. My only solution is to detangle more often to get the shed hairs out of there before they cause trouble.

Also I've found that manipulating wet hair causes more breakage for me. Now I don't comb or detangle my hair when it's wet. I try not to run my fingers through it wet too much either. I just work with my hair in halves on wash days and try to be as thorough as possible without too much finger-separating beyond that. Sometimes I work in quadrants, but halves work better for me.

Some questions you can ask yourself to figure out what went wrong when you notice broken hairs:

Is your hair dry? Brittle? Hard? What styles are you wearing? Do you comb/brush, and what kind do you use? Do you have tangles? How gentle are you when separating them? Are your nails neat, cut, and not snagging on your hair?

And for us naturals, we wear twists as a protective style and maybe don't think about it, but twists in the back can rub against your clothes, leading to breaking ends; and the ends are still exposed to the elements. Your ends aren't really "protected" in twists. I've started pinning mine up in the back until my hair is long enough where I can tuck them under.

I think manipulating wet hair is my problem. I think I may need to wait until it's mostly dry to apply product. I mean, right now, my hair is mostly dry, and I can run my hands through it, pull on it, etc. without seeing a broken hair.

I had that problem too! Try a leave in with protein like aphogee or the green tea reconstrutor. What kind of protein treatment have you tried. nexxus emergencee is great. My hair is getting better now. I can use nexxus emergencee without following up with moisture. My hair is strengthening with every treatment. Sometimes when you use a protein treatment and follow up with moisture it can cancel out each other. I learned that from GYMFREAK. Best advice I could have gotton.

I am just little scared to mess around with harder protein treatments. Besides the little bit of breakage, my hair is pretty happy. I am afraid introducing a hard protein could upset it. But, if I do not see any improvement in a month from now, I think I will give it a shot. Thanks!

Hey detroiter!

Hey! :grin:
 
I feel you. :nono:

The best thing to do is try to figure out what's causing it and correct it at that point. I notice that most of my breakage comes from knots. And a lot of my knots come from shed hairs that are wrapping around good hairs and my breaking it off. My only solution is to detangle more often to get the shed hairs out of there before they cause trouble.

Also I've found that manipulating wet hair causes more breakage for me. Now I don't comb or detangle my hair when it's wet. I try not to run my fingers through it wet too much either. I just work with my hair in halves on wash days and try to be as thorough as possible without too much finger-separating beyond that. Sometimes I work in quadrants, but halves work better for me.

Some questions you can ask yourself to figure out what went wrong when you notice broken hairs:

Is your hair dry? Brittle? Hard? What styles are you wearing? Do you comb/brush, and what kind do you use? Do you have tangles? How gentle are you when separating them? Are your nails neat, cut, and not snagging on your hair?

And for us naturals, we wear twists as a protective style and maybe don't think about it, but twists in the back can rub against your clothes, leading to breaking ends; and the ends are still exposed to the elements. Your ends aren't really "protected" in twists. I've started pinning mine up in the back until my hair is long enough where I can tuck them under.

The same is true for me. I get soooo much breakage if I touch my hair while it's wet, especially when I'm applying my dc to my hair after I shampoo. How do you apply your DC all over without a lot of manipulation. I think tackling this one problem will help me out a lot. Oh and I also get a ton of breakage just during the normal week, I think I need to up my protein.
 
The same is true for me. I get soooo much breakage if I touch my hair while it's wet, especially when I'm applying my dc to my hair after I shampoo. How do you apply your DC all over without a lot of manipulation. I think tackling this one problem will help me out a lot. Oh and I also get a ton of breakage just during the normal week, I think I need to up my protein.

My hair isn't very dense, so I don't have a lot of trouble with getting my conditioner all over. I just use a LOT of it, like 1/3 of an average-sized bottle. I basically just dump it in my palms and "smear" it on. I do the "scooping" motion, like if you were making ponytails. This was much easier when I was DCing on wet hair though; I'm still trying to find a better way of applying it on dry hair. :ohwell:
 
Sometimes you may not be able to see the bulb.


But, if you run your hands over the length of the hair, you would be able to feel it at the end. It's hard for me to see the bulbs of my hair when it's shedding, so I have to feel the hair instead to make sure.
 
Every time I wash my hair, I lose hairs. When I apply product to wet hair, I get hairs in my hands. :nono: When I look at these hairs, they never have white bulbs attached to them. I rarely ever see hair with white bulbs attached to them. Could it be that the hair I think is breakage is just shed hair?

If it is breakage, then I can honestly say nothing works to get rid of it: protein treatments, oil rinsing, ayurveda. I am really hoping this is just shedding. :ohwell:


Thanks for starting this thread. My last wash, I experienced the same problem. I just twisted my hair up though. Next wash, I will use my 2 min reconstructor and see if that helps. It does make sense though that with me anyway, putting stuff in my hair while wet would cause me to break off my hair. That must mean that maybe it's over moisturized. Them darn avocados:lachen:
 
I had that problem too! Try a leave in with protein like aphogee or the green tea reconstrutor. What kind of protein treatment have you tried. nexxus emergencee is great. My hair is getting better now. I can use nexxus emergencee without following up with moisture. My hair is strengthening with every treatment. Sometimes when you use a protein treatment and follow up with moisture it can cancel out each other. I learned that from GYMFREAK. Best advice I could have gotton.

Yep, ITA. I figured that out sometime late last year when I was too lazy to do a moisture DC after the Aphogee 2 min. . .and my hair was definitely stronger, while normally when I DC'd after, it felt mostly the same.

Now I've learned to kinda just feel my hair out. I can usually touch it a few times and tell whether the moisture DC is needed or not. And even during those times I just try to do a couple mins with Aussie moist deeep 3 min miracle.
 
My hair is breaking excessively. Today I used the Aphogee 2 min reconstructor for the first time and I followed with the Keracare deep conditioner under my dryer for 20 minutes. I noticed here that someone said using a moisturizing conditioner would override the protein so my suggestion would be to use a protein leave in. That's what I did I used some Salerm 21 and rollerset my hair. This is the first time I've done this and I've never used products in my hair except gel, which i'm sure is the contributing factor to my breakage. I have to tell you that when I combed my wrap down, there was very little hair on the floor! I was amazed. I will continue to use the 2 minute treatment for the next few weeks and I'll let you know how it goes.
 
I'm in the same boat. i find that my hair break/shed while putting on deep conditioner or just plain messing with it while its wet. Its so hard to keep my hands out of my head though cuz when i see all that breakage all I wanna do is massage my scalp and make sure my baby is okay.
 
Sometimes you may not be able to see the bulb.


But, if you run your hands over the length of the hair, you would be able to feel it at the end. It's hard for me to see the bulbs of my hair when it's shedding, so I have to feel the hair instead to make sure.

ITA! I have to run my fingers over the strand to feel for the bulb. I've noticed when I am in the early weeks after a relaxer, the white bulb is extremely hard to see. As I approach 7-10 weeks post relaxer, the bulb is more evident to the eye for me...don't know why though.
 
I had that problem too! Try a leave in with protein like aphogee or the green tea reconstrutor. What kind of protein treatment have you tried. nexxus emergencee is great. My hair is getting better now. I can use nexxus emergencee without following up with moisture. My hair is strengthening with every treatment. Sometimes when you use a protein treatment and follow up with moisture it can cancel out each other. I learned that from GYMFREAK. Best advice I could have gotton.


Wow. I wondered about this. After I use a protein, or ayurvedic powders, I have little to no shed/broken hairs. But after I follow up with moisture, there hairs are there. I wondered how can this be possible? I guess this is true for me too.
 
Every time I wash my hair, I lose hairs. When I apply product to wet hair, I get hairs in my hands. :nono: When I look at these hairs, they never have white bulbs attached to them. I rarely ever see hair with white bulbs attached to them. Could it be that the hair I think is breakage is just shed hair?

If it is breakage, then I can honestly say nothing works to get rid of it: protein treatments, oil rinsing, ayurveda. I am really hoping this is just shedding. :ohwell:

Thanks you so much for asking this question for the naturals. I'm having the same exact problem with breakage as well. Using a protein treatment followed up by a moisturizing conditioner might help. Today will be my first week with a deep conditioning 2x a week because of the dry, tangled, stiff, feeling of my hair.
 
Hmmm.... Okay, I think I will try some protein. I am going to flat iron my hair this week, so I guess a protein treatment will do me some good.

I wonder if anyone knows: If I use a protein treatment and co-wash it out or use a leave-in, will that cancel it out? I need to put some moisture back in my hair.
 
Hi,

I have natural hair 4a/4b and had loads of breakage

1. my hair was knotting a lot so I spend a lot of time on my ends, now with leave-in conditioner and glycerine on my dry hair every time I manipulate my hair
2. My hair likes processes. So I have to do the protein conditioning first and then the moisturising conditioning, If I try to do both not so good

So far so good (knock on wood)

Oh yeah, and my hair in under a wig at work,

Hope this helps
 
Sounds like breakage to me but there is always hope. I used to have alot of breakage and now I have close to none! Do you cowash often? How often do you moisturize? I saw you mention protein treatments aren't working so maybe moisture could be the problem. That used to be my issue. Now I cowash every other day with a moisturizing conditioner and use that same conditioner watered down in a spritz bottle and seal twice a day. I don't have any hairs in my sink or anything. Any that I do see throughout the day always have a white bulb at the top ( I inspect too!!! lol )

I hope this helps you!

p.s. Oh yea, I forgot to add that I also deep condition at least 3 times a week. Maybe your hair needs extra care like that as well.
 
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