Hair

Impromptu Trim August 2020

I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube videos of late. A lot! I think I may be slightly obsessed. The amount of natural hair and skincare content is overwhelming and amazing at the same time. Such things as how other people have grown their type 4 hair long. Turmeric Masks for hyperpigmentation. Reviews of products Instagram shoves down your throat like – Nuud deodorant and EZ Detangler brushes. Plus, general YouTube tea and drama.

I’ve been watching so much but also taking in a fair bit of knowledge too. It is actually mostly educational…what I watch anyway. However, all of these things I’ve listed were just distractions from what I was actually trying to find out more about. And that was how to resolve the bushy ends of my hair. And the answer was an impromptu trim.

To be fair,  a trim was the short answer. The longer answer was that my hair may be full of split ends. It also may be pH imbalanced, meaning the cuticles of my hair may not be laying as flat as they could, therefore my ends feel bushy. But if addressing the pH didn’t resolve my problem, then a trim may be needed. I originally was going to try ACV rinses every wash day until my next Length Check in November to see if that would help. According to some videos I’d found, that could be a possible fix.

It took less than 48 hours of thinking that giving ACV rinses a try to going ahead and just trimming my ends was the way to go. I guess I was more sick of them feeling rough, bushy and dry than I was motivated to wait for something new to work. If a trim could solve it, then why not? The mini trim I had a couple of weeks ago hadn’t made a difference. Maybe I needed something more drastic.

Health over length, health over length, health over length. It’s just hair, it’s just hair, it’s just hair. Trim away then…I guess.

And I was aware that I may be trimming off some healthy hair but this different textured part of my hair also tangles more and that must be worse for my hair? I recently said that in this house, we don’t trim just because, we trim when it feels like it’s time. It felt like time.

My hair was in chunky twists from my Jim & Henry wash day at the weekend. I was left with around 13 of them which gave me decent size sections to work my trimming magic on.

 

I undid one twist as you can see here and split it into two.

The top section is me gently pulling my hair straight, the other section I’m holding is the twist out. I clipped the twist out section out of my way and I’m left with half a twist. Then I finger detangled my new section, stretching it out a little more.

 

 


I split that half twist section into 4 and placed a small clip to the end of each of the four sections. I took one of these four sections and slowly and gently pull my thumb and finger along the length of the hair until I find the point that the texture changes from smooth to rough. This is where I cut.

I wouldn’t quite see this as a Seek and Destroy method of trimming as I believe that entails strand by strand interrogation into your hair and only snipping where needed. What I was doing was just getting rid of all the ends so the section I was holding felt smooth all the way along.

 

 

 

So this is what it looked like pre-trim. Every thing is a bit scruffy looking and uneven.

I forgot to say, please make sure your scissors are sharp before you cut. If you cut with blunt scissors, you can leave your ends jagged, meaning you are more prone to split ends and problems like I think I was faced with.

 

 

 

 

This is the same section post-trim. The ends are a bit more even. My hair has a more even fullness from the root to tip, rather than tapering off into a dry mess at the ends. Whether this necessitated a trim or not, I don’t know for sure. But from what I know, it seemed like the best idea. My ends were not feeling good and it has been well over a year since my last substantial trim.

It’s one of my priorities at the moment to learn a little bit more about signs of needing a trim, best ways to do it and the best ways to avoid needing to do it in the first place..

Also, is that a bit of a “curl pattern” there or am I seeing things? It doesn’t matter anyway, my focus on this day was trimming and moisturising.

Ta-dah!

 

After all 4 of the mini sections were trimmed, I spritzed the section with water. Followed by Jim + Henry Ten (thick leave-in conditioner for afro hair) and followed up by their oil, Five.

Final step was to re-twist my hair, as you can see. Each new, fresh twist was the size of my 4 mini sections. Most of the twists are more even in “girth” all the way along. And even if it tapers at the tip, the hair is forming really nice tight coils when wound around my finger, not the weird wispy mess I was getting before.

 

I’m much happier with how my hair feels and by the time my next Length Check comes around at the 4 year mark of this health hair journey, I might have an answer of how better to deal with my bushy ends. Or better yet, I won’t have them!

Let’s keep growing (and trimming when we need to) together!

xx Lee xx

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xxxxx

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