About a year after beginning my healthy hair journey, I was fairly certain that I had successfully mastered growing my coily hair. However, I had yet to figure out how to detangle my fro without it being an all-day affair. Perhaps, that’s an exaggeration, but it lasted much longer than I felt necessary. So for the last 4 years, I’ve been on a quest to make detangling my hair easy, relatively quick and painless.
As a basic rule of thumb, my hair is always coated in conditioner and I use a wide tooth seamless comb when detangling. These are a few slight modifications that can help to make your detangling sessions less stressful.
Under Running Water
If you’ve never detangled your hair under running water in the shower then you don’t know what you’re missing. Trust me! This works best if you section your hair before washing and coat in conditioner. You don’t need to detangle until you go in the shower. Take one twist down and let the water run down the hair as you comb through the section with a wide toothed comb. The pressure from the water helps to naturally detangle the hair and assists in combing. I don’t do this every time I wash but I do find that when I use this method more shed hair is removed than when I detangle with conditioner alone. Therefore, if you find this beneficial you might consider doing it once a month in order to remove shed hair that may have been left behind in your previous detangling sessions.
Different Combs, Different Sections
My hair is multi-textured and as a result some parts of my hair are easier to detangle than others. For example, the middle sections of my hair are looser textured but the strands are rather coarse, making it the most difficult section of my hair to comb. For that section of my hair it is necessary that I only use a wide tooth. Other sections of my hair have fine strands so I find that I can use a comb with narrower spaces in the comb. This is useful during the times I may choose to lightly straighten my hair with a blow dryer and I need to thoroughly detangle my hair.
Root Stretching
The part of my hair that becomes the most tangled over the course of a week is my roots. The hair at the root is new growth, healthy and thus the most tightly coiled part of my hair. I find that simply stretching the hair while combing (be sure the hair is coated with a slippery conditioner) can make detangling your roots easier.
Do you use any unconventional techniques to detangle your hair? What is your fastest method of detangling your hair?