5 tips to grow your type 4 hair long!

Always wanted your natural hair type 4 hair bouncing about your back? Never could get it more than a few inches past your ears? Lets get one thing straight. Afro textured hair grows. Not only does it grow, It’s always growing. What if I told you I have the secret formula to grow your hair 6 inches per year. No gimmicks, fads, or fake miracles. How do I know? I’ve done it, still doing it! And it works. If you’ve ever had braids before and you’ve noticed the roots rising, you’ve noticed the braids getting looser? Then your hair grows just fine. The trick is to not lose any of that length. Key phrase alert ‘length retention’. This just means growing your hair faster than you break the ends off. In fact, why not stop breaking the ends off completely. A combination of care methods will help you achieve the optimum growth retention. I did say formula, not recipe. After all, what I’ve learned is to keep things simple.

I’m going to make it real easy. Let me break it down for you.

Here’s what you need to do:

Stop messing with your hair all the time

Choose a protective style that suits you. If you can avoid manipulating your hair for weeks at a time you’re onto a winner. But take care when taking down your protective style. It would be a shame to snap off the same amount of length of hair that you’ve just spent weeks growing!

Moisture

It is so incredibly important for your hair not to dry out. If it does, its automatically going to be prone to breakage. I recommend spraying your hair with rose water or the best quality water you have access to. Follow up the mist of water with a leave- in conditioner of your choice. I use the Cantu range but use whatever you have tried and tested that works for you. Then you need to lock that all in with a butter or oil. See! Easy as 1, 2, 3! You may have noticed that this is a L-C-O (Liquid – Cream – Oil) method as opposed to the usually suggested LOC (Liquid – oil – cream) method. You’ll thank me later.

Keep your scalp clean

The last thing you want is to block your hair follicles with product build up, oil and dead skin cells. We’re going for optimum growth here! We need to keep the way clear, we’re on a mission. I recommend washing your scalp (hair too if you can but scalp is more important) every 2 weeks whether the protective style is still in or not. And don’t forget to replace the moisture you washed out of your tresses.

Keep your scalp hydrated

Hydrating your scalp with water around every 3 days will allow your natural sebum (natural oil in your skin) production to be regulated. Yes that’s right. Our scalps moisturise themselves! Applying oil to the scalp can cause sebum production to decrease so much so that your scalp starts to flake. Besides if your scalp produces its own oil, why buy it? However, this will not work if You don’t hydrate your scalp every few days and wash it around every couple of weeks. This can take a bit of getting used to. Both for you and your scalp but stick it out. If your scalp does start to dry in the process, the best thing to do is wash it.

De-tangle your hair

There’s plenty on YouTube to aid you with this. But the basics are to separate your hair strands with your fingers and thumb. Whenever you encounter a knot gently pull above and below the knot, as strands will safely find their way and slide out without any breakage.

Happy hair growing!