who else is 4a with ITTY BITTY coils???

[RecipeBABY]

Isn't your hair in mini twists in this pic? That would help it to clump better.

4a coils can be bigger than 4b coils, but they usually aren't. Which is why type 4's are stuck together... the coil size is very tiny for both. They both don't fit into a type 3 category and they both tend to be around the same size when you look at the diameter of the coils.

Of course there is SOME clumping in 4b due to the curly nature, but like you said, it's hard to see. You can plainly see it in pookie's hair without magnifying it too much, with your hair, it's not easy to see. The coils don't uniformly clump up.

oMG I WOULD CRY..CUZ I LIKE TO WEAR MY HAIR STRAIGHT.. AND THATS SO TINY

 

[drjo91]

I have those too lol.

 

[loulou82]

I think someone needs to pop in here with a magnified pic of 4A hair because Nonie's pic's look like a variation of 4A to me. Like some 4A can be fine, dense, thick, thin, porous. Many descriptions assign pen spring curls to 4A hair and undefined/zig zig curl patterns to 4B. (smh in confusion).

 

[Neith]

I think someone needs to pop in here with a magnified pic of 4A hair because Nonie's pic's look like a variation of 4A to me. Like some 4A can be fine, dense, thick, thin, porous. Many descriptions assign pen spring curls to 4A hair and undefined/zig zig curl patterns to 4B. (smh in confusion).

Nonie's (and everyone elses hair) looks different at different times. When her hair is wet it curls up more, when it's in twists it coils up beautifully, but just look at the dry pics and compare to pookie's. To me there is a pretty strong difference. For lack of a better word, Nonie's is more "fuzzy" (both heads of hair are gorgeous! )

Just seems like that to me... but I always seem to be in the minority when it comes to hair typing.

 

[poookie]

How did you get them sooooo small

God made them that way

but i had no idea my coils were so unique! SO happy to see that i have hair twins, but i didn't know my coil size was so rare.

i LOVE my itty bitty coils!!! funny thing is, they only exist on the edge of my hair by the ears. everywhere else, they're biggier, and more s-shaped.

i love playing in them. i love stretching them, and letting them bounce back into place

 

[CheLala13]

Hey I have those in the middle!! I think they are adorable!

 

[ajoyfuljoy]

Oh yeah OP, I am 4a and I have some coils around your size, but most of mine are bigger, more coffe stirrer sized and some just a tad bit bigger than that. I too also feel lonely on this board b/c I don't noticed many naturals with tiny, defined coils like ours. I wonder what the hair would look like when all grown out?

I've noticed though that when I get some months going on my new growth, they clump together a little more and form unions, so maybe it would look different if you grew it out more?

IDK I assumed that 4a was coils ranging from pen spring sized to coffe stirrer sized, including the OPs coils.

4b doesn't have a identifiable pattern, no obvious coil pattern or anything like that. Then you have 4c, the cnapps, where every strand just does its own thing and the hair looks like cotton most of the time.

That is what I've understood from my studies.

 

[poookie]

mine look exactly like yours

wow....those ARE tiny! I think mine are a tiny bit larger, and i mean a tiny bit....but those are gorgeous mama!

aww, thank ya!!

OP, I am your hair twin!!!

When my natural hair was SL, it would shrink to one inch long when I washed it!!

Very fine, tight 4A coils.

Must be something in the water over here!

yay! i have hair twins!!!

oMG I WOULD CRY..CUZ I LIKE TO WEAR MY HAIR STRAIGHT.. AND THATS SO TINY

me too, but they aren't hard to straighten at all!

i have those around my hairline and they drive me nuts

hehe, i love mine!!

and nonie, i absolutely ADORE your hair!!

your coils are much bigger than mine. and mine are weird; they don't really shrink up (just the itty bitty ones). all the pics i took were of them unstretched . that might be because of the relaxed hair attached to it... but there's only about 2 or 3 inches of relaxed hair attached to the coils; i doubt they're being weighed down too much.

i LOVE how diverse each one of our heads of hair are!!! it's so beautiful! :terdrop:

 

[Neith]

I'll add my pic, lol.

That part of my hair is natural, loose, dry 4a hair.

I can't really get in there like Nonie, I tried. I may have to break out my good camera one of these days.

I swear I didn't mess with it... just looked in the mirror and it just happened to be sticking out

 

[danigurl18]

I have couple but most of mine are like 50x that size lol.. they are cute!

 

[TaurusAngel]

Oh my!!!!! I do!!!!! I can't post pics because i recently relaxed, but i have coils about that size. Its a pain for me to detangle when i stretch.

 

[Ediese]

Those are like mine and I am 4B. *shrug*

The reason most of you don't have them that small is coz you are 4A. 4A spirals are bigger and respond well to WNGs.

I was thinking that it was 4b, but wasn't sure because I thought I read that 4b didn't have curls. idk

 

[RedVelvet310]

Wowww... and I thought mine were small.. I just wish there was a product out there that could allow us to define those tiny curls without it getting frizzy. That would look BEAUTIFUL!

 

[Mook's hair]

Noni - Thank you for posting those pics they are fabulous!
I am just in love with your hair.

 

[BeetleBug]

I think Andre's system should vanish. It's flawed and it doesn't exactly describe an individual's hair. It's also confusing. I think people should just describe their hair as it is.

 

[naijamerican]

I totally agree with what Nonie said. Since we all know that Andre's hair typing system is fundamentally flawed, then we should divorce ourselves of what constitutes 4B vs. 4A hair or, at the very least, redefine it. I have never in my entire life seen hair that is TOTALLY undefined. What I HAVE seen his hair that looks that way from afar and, upon closer inspection, is noticeably coily. That, to me, is what 4B hair is. It's not that it has no curl definition. It's that it's hard to tell if you look at it from far away. I also have never really seen z curls. Finally, now that I have really mastered which products work best for my hair, I now see that I'm not a C-napp and that I really am 4B. Nonie is my hair twin through and through; so is Mscocoface.

OP, I love the little curlies you have; that's how my whole head of hair is, and I really like it. Just like you, I love pulling them out and watching them spring back into place. I love the fact that my hair is deceptively short, too. It's so cool.

 

[Southernbella.]

That's what Andre or someone else says but I beg to disagree. 4B hair has a pattern but the coils are so small that they are not easily seen. Plus 4B hair due to its tiny coils tangles easily so the MO is to keep it braided or to manipulate it in ways that make it appear not to have a pattern, just to keep the coils from tangling up. But if you were to wash it and condition it...and you may have to do it a few time and then just let it be, you'd see the tiny coils. I would not advice to do it over the whole head coz you'll have a mess of tangles that you will not want to deal with.

My hair cannot be called 4A. Most times it looks like it has no pattern.

But that's usually because it's just been out of braids. That manipulation pulls it straight and then the bending this way and that way act of braiding further makes the texture appear different. BTW, that's hair with no product at all.

This is also 4B hair w/o product that was baggied without being braided after being worn out. I thought I could finger comb when it was damp from the baggy but it got to be too much to handle:

So I put on conditioner and finger combed with it (a tip from Dsylla) and this was the result.

First with conditioner on:

And then after detangling and rinsing off conditioner, my fully detangled hair:

So I have my own typing system that defies the rule that there is anyone born with hair that doesn't have a pattern. And I'd be willing to challenge Andre on that. I think a better definition for 4B hair would be "hair that APPEARS not to have any pattern but actually does when viewed closely".

Your hair is gorgeous!

This is why I call myself 4A/B. A lot of people have tried to tell me that I'm strictly 4A, but there are plenty of areas in my head that look just like yours...there appears to be no pattern when dry with no product, but very coily when well moisturized and stretched.

 

[Nonie]

Isn't your hair in mini twists in this pic? That would help it to clump better.

4a coils can be bigger than 4b coils, but they usually aren't. Which is why type 4's are stuck together... the coil size is very tiny for both. They both don't fit into a type 3 category and they both tend to be around the same size when you look at the diameter of the coils.

Of course there is SOME clumping in 4b due to the curly nature, but like you said, it's hard to see. You can plainly see it in pookie's hair without magnifying it too much, with your hair, it's not easy to see. The coils don't uniformly clump up.

No, if you remember, this experiment I did the day you posted a thread about 4B not existing. I undid a section of my hair (I was still on the Hard C&G challenge) and then I CW'd then applied one of those curly pudding creamy things (I don't know which--I can go find the thread where I posted exactly what I did as I posted immediately after and so had the details then). Hated the way the hair felt so washed off and CW again and tried S Curl gel...and hated the stickiness then washed off... I remember I did it a few times. The difference between what I did here and what I normally do, is I didn't try to finger comb and separate my strands. I sort of let them do their thang. I then took the pics to show you that if I didn't manipulate my hair to keep strands separate, I'd get this. My hair is NOT in twists there.
Here's another view of those strands:

My hair is exactly as it is in the pics I posted before (the one where I detangled after baggying w/o braiding),only in those pics I was deliberately trying to keep strands apart (finger combing)--as the purpose was detangling, yet there are still a few strands that stayed together in a spiral-y shape.

My hair in twists looks like this:

I guess we all understand things differently because even in this picture:

of my hair taken in the office yesterday before I posted, I see clumping. None of those strands are single. Maybe I need to try to separate my hair into single strands so you can see what a single strands looks like and then you'd see that the magnified pics really do show what you see in the last pic above. The section (tip) above the word yesterday (in red) is the only part showing a single strand. The rest are clumps.

As I said before, if I didn't worry about knots and detangling, I'd wear my entire head like that. But this clumping isn't something I aim to achieve. (I guess it's from years of not trying to do "creative things" with my hair that don't seem practical.) Which is why I could never do a WNG.

When I attempted it, I didn't just shake my hair. I combed it when it was dripping wet. HAD TO...coz otherwise I'd have a headache dealing with it. I applied lots of product which was supposed to weigh it down and make it hang and bounce. Instead, my hair dried into a bun cake:

Uhmm...proving the point that not every hairstyle can be worn on every hair. I mean, I could do a WNG but what's the point when my hair'll just look like a combed out 'fro or 'fro puff. Why not just do the practical thing and comb it out so that I will have less detangling to do later? Plus methinks the results look better:

So while close up the coils look good when I don't manipulate my hair, I really don't try to wear my hair like that because it'd be difficult to deal with if I allowed the strands to keep clumping. So the MO is to keep them separate as seen in the pics I posted before when we discussed this topic of 4b coils:

This is also the reason why when I twist, I take care to ensure the two strands are kept separate by twisting them on their own first so that the hairs in either stay separate from those in the other. This makes untwisting really easy and tangling almost impossible, but as you will see from my untwisting, keeping strands separate is very important to me and something I am anal about. (See vid of me undoing a twist.) If my hair didn't clump, I wouldn't have to keep working on separating my strands.

Oh and one more thing, Poookie has her finger behind her hair to provide a contrasting background so you can see the clump she's holding. My hair is being seen in a bunch with other black hair behind each strand providing just darkness. If I held a finger behind my hair as she is doing, you would see the same thing. But do I really need to? Isn't my forehead above providing that? Or the white wall in the pic with the springs?

Guess we can just agree to disagree. A rose by any name would still smell sweet.

 

[QT]

God made them that way

but i had no idea my coils were so unique! SO happy to see that i have hair twins, but i didn't know my coil size was so rare.

i LOVE my itty bitty coils!!! funny thing is, they only exist on the edge of my hair by the ears. everywhere else, they're biggier, and more s-shaped.

i love playing in them. i love stretching them, and letting them bounce back into place

Do u still relax your hair?

 

[Nonie]

I totally agree with what Nonie said. Since we all know that Andre's hair typing system is fundamentally flawed, then we should divorce ourselves of what constitutes 4B vs. 4A hair or, at the very least, redefine it. I have never in my entire life seen hair that is TOTALLY undefined. What I HAVE seen his hair that looks that way from afar and, upon closer inspection, is noticeably coily. That, to me, is what 4B hair is. It's not that it has no curl definition. It's that it's hard to tell if you look at it from far away. I also have never really seen z curls. Finally, now that I have really mastered which products work best for my hair, I now see that I'm not a C-napp and that I really am 4B. Nonie is my hair twin through and through; so is Mscocoface.

OP, I love the little curlies you have; that's how my whole head of hair is, and I really like it. Just like you, I love pulling them out and watching them spring back into place. I love the fact that my hair is deceptively short, too. It's so cool.

Love to have you for a twin! And your last sentiment further proves we were really separated at birth. I LOVE that little secret our hair keeps.

 

[Kay.Dee]

Nonie, your hair is so healthy! I was looking at my hair and I think I've damaged it from to much combing, because the ends of the coils are all tattered and shredded.


coils individually

as a whole

 

[Nonie]

Nonie, your hair is so healthy! I was looking at my hair and I think I've damaged it from to much combing, because the ends of the coils are all tattered and shredded.


coils individually

as a whole

Oooh...you're my twin too! *doing a li'l dance, makin' a li'l noise...*

Kay.dee, those are the tips I was dusting off the other day. I get them too. I think they're from wear and tear, whether from combing or just being around for a long time.

 

[gymfreak336]

My hair looks exactly like yours.

 

[CheLala13]

Wow, I'm so confused now.

 

[anon123]

Oh no, the 4a vs. 4b debate has resurfaced!

Pookie I'll say that you might want to hold off on making conclusions based on that tiny coil. There are spots where my hair will do that, and I've found the world's tiniest coils around my edges. I mean, they are tiny. They make a coffee stirrer look big. But that's not the size of the kinks/coils on the rest of my head, for the most part. The others range from coffee stirrer size at the smallest, pen spring at the largest.

As to the never-ending 4a and 4b debate, Nonie and I always disagree. But I've tried more things on my hair than Nonie has (a superset of what she's tried, as far as I can tell) and I can say with high degree of certainty that my hair does not clump the way hers does in that pic of perfect spirals lying on her forehead. Some level of clumping, yes. Like that, nope. Not every 4b's hair is the same, same thing for 4as. This is a good example after many days of cowashing and/or water rinsing with no combing. This is one of the most clumping part of my hair at its maximum clumpage. At it moves closer to the root, fewer and fewer hairs form part of any coil clump.

 

[*Muffin*]

Here's a pic of my coils. I'm guessing they are 4a. I currently label myself as 3c/4a because my curls vary in size depending on the region of my head. My curl texture is looser toward the front and tighter toward the back.

P.S. Sorry the pic is so large .

 

[Ediese]

Okay...now I'm just a little confused. I've been under the impression that I'm 4a. Are we saying that there are different variations to 4a??

Hair wet just rinsed conditioner



Hair dry in a pony



Hair wet w/conditioner




Excuse my nails..I think I applied a rinse so they turned black


Clumped together

 

[anon123]

^^Oh, there have got to be variations withing 4a, just like there are in 4b. All these different heads of hair don't fit neatly into 2 simple categories. So we have to have categories that actually include a range of sub types.

 

[NikStarrr]

@ Ediese--are you natural?

 

[Ediese]

Oh no, the 4a vs. 4b debate has resurfaced!

Not every 4b's hair is the same, same thing for 4as.

I'm just realizing that. I guess that's why alot of people dont' like typing their hair.