Hi people, what's been on?

You know how when styling your hair or putting it up in a bun, you always have those annoying little hairs poking out all over the place making your style look messy???

Well, it could actually be a good thing! I'll explain why soon.

DRYNESS

When your hair is dry it naturally looks outward for moisture. In reaching out to moisture it rises as it expands to take up water. To prevent this from ruining your perfect style, you have to keep it hydrated. It's like when we were little and we had a mate's party to attend, my mum will make sure we ate until we could eat no more before leaving the house. This was so she could avoid the embarrasing situation where we may cry and disturb our host or look with 'long throat' at every food that was served.
Our hair is a bit like that. Moisturise it enough and have less frizz because the strands will be 'full of water'. This can be achieved with regular deep conditioning treatments, rare use of heat appliances and avoidance of products that are alcohol based or have a pH higher than 5/6 (more alkaline than pH of hair 4.5) which causes the cuticles to open up and thus the hair loses water.

-DRY COMBING/HAND IN HAIR

Coily/curly hair should never be combed when dry. Not only does this prevent breakage it also prevents disruption of coils/curls that clumped. If you want defined, frizz free curls, never touch (including curious people) your hair once your set has dried. My pet peeve is when I've taken my time to style my hair and someone decides to touch it. Seriously, away goes my frizz free twists, braids, wash n go, twistout, rollerset and even my slicked back bun.
Touching. Non bueno.

- STATIC

Have you heard your hair crackle, pop and even give off tiny sparks in dry weather?
This is called static. Hair is negatively charged and when dry the strands repel each other, they fly away from each other. Something like this:

I experienced this when my cousin helped to straighten my hair with a flat iron one very cold dry harmattan. Despite using a little serum prior to straightening, when we were done,
my hair formed a floating halo around my head and if you touched it, you could almost see the sparks flying.
 I tried to smooth it down and combing only made it worse. My hair descended down to earth only when I applied more serum.
I learnt then that static can be made worse by dry brushing or combing especially with a plastic comb/brush.
Static can be reduced by conditioning the hair and using a light hair serum/spray to coat strands and reduce the effect of the charges.

- BREAKAGE

When your hair breaks uncontrollably, you'll have a lot of uneven lengths which won't lie smoothly and fit into your hair style causing it to look fuzzy all the time!
Way back when when I heat styled like it was going out of fashion, I had a lot of breakage especially around my hairline. When I pulled my hair back together in a bun, my bun would look rough and fuzzy as a lot of shorter strands poked out.

Fast forward to today when my damaged hair has grown out and is thriving and I rarely need the help of a gel to slick my hair in place.



Few strands out of place and no gel

So what's the good thing about frizziness?

NEW GROWTH!!!!

When new hair grows in, it is generally shorter than the rest of the older strands and will poke out of your style!
 The difference between a broken strand and the new growth is that the tips of the new growth is tapered not blunt.
So if you see lots of healthy short tapered strands, most likely it's just baby hair growing up.

 That's a really good thing, abi???