Moisture is one the most important things for us Afro-hair girls to maintain, as our hair is innately dry. When using any sort of product that gives off heat you could take a few precautions to prevent heat damage. These tips should help you do just that. They will be useful for those of you who tend to use heat on your hair regularly.
Tips
1. Using your Blow-dryer on clean and conditioned hair
- Washing your hair before blow drying it always ensures you obtain a better result as unwashed hair can be greasy and using heat on greasy hair is literally frying it! No one wants curly french fries on their heads :0
- Using a Leave-In Conditioner after your hair-wash routine to make sure your hair is nice and moisturised before applying the heat as well as a heat protectant just optimises your hair’s moisture before applying heat onto it
2. Detangling your Hair before hand
- Girl… This will make your life so much easier trust me. Just using some of your favourite leave-in conditioner and a wide tooth comb to detangle through sections of your hair before blowdrying makes the whole process so much quicker as you won’t have to rely on the Blow-dryer to detangle your hair.
- You can detangle your hair by hand, in the shower, or with a wide tooth comb after your shower. This will prevent the blow-dryer from straining on the knots in your hair and causing breaking.
3. Blow-Dry In Sections
- You can go over the sections you detangled with the blowdryer or split them into even smaller sections. This ensures optimum precision. Having a good quality blow-dryer, which is high in precision is key!
Why Do People Blow-dry their hair?
It makes it a whole lot easier for styling! If you’ve ever had box braids, passion twist, butterfly locs or any protective hairstyle done your hairdresser has probably blow-dried your hair before hand.
Some hair dressers are more gentle than others when it comes to this. lol. This get us onto our next point…
4. Try to be as Gentle as possible
Applying heat to our hair already makes it vulnerable to heat damage and breakage if precautions aren’t taken. Another way to avoid this is to be gentle, try to blow-dry your hair when you have time so that you don’t end up rushing and literally ripping your hair out because it is not nice…
5. Invest in a Good Quality Blow-Dryer
After prepping your hair all this time you want to make sure your hair dries nicely, here’s a list of a few different blow-dryers that are afro-hair friendly:
- Finished are those little curly bumps of hair behind your neck! This blow-dryer focuses on precisions and time efficiency. ($40)
- This one’s on the affordable side and still get the job done. It may be less precise around the neck area but you’ll still get beautiful results! ($20)