Hair

How to start a hair journey?

Teyonah Parris

Hair journey has, in recent years, become an unavoidable topic. It’s hard to ignore this “new” phenomenon, which has enabled many of us to finally reconcile with our own hair. Hair is a real subject within black women. In fact, that is the most popular category of my blog.

Many of us have been guilty of neglecting and damaging our hair due to harmful products and/or lack of maintenance. This could be for several reasons: lack of time, facility, ignorance, etc. Therefore, I decided to share with you my knowledge in hair journeys. So, find out here how to start a hair journey.

What’s a hair journey?

It’s discovering your own hair. This is the process by which you learn to love your hair, acquire the right ways to maintain it in order to have healthy (and long) hair.

To embark on a hair journey, you must do some researches. The goal here is to learn about Afro hair, about everything that involves a hair journey, and to learn to get to know your own hair (type, the degree of porosity, etc.). You can undoubtedly find a lot of information on the internet and social media; however, you need to be careful and not follow everything. You can always ask for the help of a professional hairdresser if you are afraid.

Hair porosity

Knowing your hair porosity is really something important you need to know before starting your hair care regimen. Why? Because this will allow you to know the capacity of your hair to absorb and hold moisture. Therefore, it will help you to better understand your hair and build the appropriate hair routine for yourself! By knowing your hair porosity, you will be aware of how you need to treat your hair to get healthy hair.

There are three degrees of hair porosity: low, medium, and high. How to determine your hair porosity? It’s simple. Take a couple of strands of hair (clean, dry, and without hair product) from your comb or brush and put them in a glass/bowl of water at room temperature. Leave the hair in the water for a minute. If your hair remains on the surface, this means that you have low porosity hair. If your hair sinks to the bottom of the glass, you have high porosity hair. If your hair floats in the middle of the glass of water, you have medium porosity hair.

hair porosity test

image credit: pinterest.co.uk

The “good” level of porosity is medium because this means that your hair absorbs and holds the right amount of moisture. When you have low porosity hair, the cuticle scales are compact. This indicates that the moisture hardly penetrates your hair, but once it penetrated, your hair holds it perfectly. When you have high porosity hair, the cuticle scales are wide open. Moisture is easily absorbed, but hardly remains.

We recommend you favour heat (hot towel, steamer, etc.) and light vegetable oils if you have low porosity hair. By contrast, we recommend you protein hair treatments and thick vegetable oils if you have high porosity hair.

Hair types

There are different hair types, ranging from 2A to 4C type. To make it easier, I’ll let you have a look at the images below:

Hair types

image credit: pinterest.co.uk

To be able to determine your hair type, you need to make your hair wet. You’ll be able to see your curl pattern and see what your hair type is. Please note that you can have several curl patterns, but the predominant type will be your hair type. Knowing your hair type will help you to figure how to manage and style your hair more effectively.

Hair care regimen

Once you’ve become familiar with your hair, you can start building your hair care regimen. In other words, you’ll buy the products you need, and you’ll adopt a set of practices and regular gestures (daily, weekly, and monthly) to acquire healthy hair.

Know that hair routine is individual. Products that work on someone else’s hair won’t necessarily work on yours. You need to pay attention to your hair needs. Don’t buy everything and nothing, and make sure to try one new product at a time.

I hope this article will help you a little bit. It could have been more detailed; however, certain points will be more developed in future articles. You can also do more researches.

For those who are wondering, I have low porosity hair and 3C/4A type (predominantly 4A).

Don’t hesitate to leave a comment if you have any question.

Featured image credit: issuemagazine.com, Teyonah Parris