Reducing Heat in Your Natural Hair Care Regimen

When you are use to dealing with straight hair for the bulk of your lifetime, it’s no surprise that you would be clueless as to how you can stretch your natural hair without heat. While it’s fine to use heat to every now and then to try out a new style, keeping your usage of heat down to a minimum will lead to healthier hair.

To make your stretching process easier here are some suggestions:

1. When you wash your hair use cool to luke warm water only. Although it doesn’t feel as pleasing as hot water, cold water will enable you to retain more moisture and will give you some stretching room. Hot water will leave your hair dry and an overall unmanageable mess.

2. Without heat you have the choice of either braiding or banding your hair to give it a stretch. Both techniques will stretch your hair, but braiding  or twisting your hair is probably the most time effective option.

3. Using a denman brush on moisturized hair that has been stretched by either braiding or banding will help to further expand your hair. Make sure you are combing from the ends of your hair and then work your way up to the root.

The use of consistent heat on our hair leads to hair breakage because it depletes our hair of the moisture we work so hard to nourish our hair with. Dryness is our number one enemy when it comes to our hair’s health and growth, so anything that leads to dryness is going to be something that you want to keep down to a minimum or eliminate.

Yes, stretching your hair without heat is more time consuming but in the long run you will be pleased with the health of your hair when you reduce your usage of heat.

When you do use heat here are some tips:

• Use the lowest heat that you can to blow dry or press your hair, high heats can permanently change your hair texture and once it has changed it cannot revert back. This risk is still present with low heats but it is less likely to occur.
• Before applying heat to your hair use a heat protectant product to prevent damage.
• Stretch out the time that you apply heat to your hair. Wait at least 2 weeks and if you can wait 3 weeks even better.