natural hair stretching

Here are some tips on natural hair stretching that you can use if you are wanting to combat hair shrinkage. Wearing your naturally kinky coiled hair can be an issue at times when you are trying to wear certain styles that calls for longer hair. What makes it so crazy is that you probably have enough length for the hairstyle, but due to natural hair shrinking up to 80% of it length, it may not seem like you have long hair. Well try out one of these methods that I researched about to help stretch those curls.

• Twisting: Using two strand twist to loosen your tightly coiled hair. While wet, twist the hair in medium sized twists. When completely dry, your hair will be semi-stretched and visibly longer in length. Not too small because that could curl the ends of your hair too much, and not too big because that will leave the roots of your hair still tightly drawn up.

• Braiding: Very similar to twisting the hair. The only difference is braiding the hair and the results can be slightly different depending on your hair texture.

• Banding: Is a very popular method of stretching natural tightly coiled curly hair. This process is done by sectioning the hair and while wet combing the each section, then adding an elastic band around the hair to form a ponytail. You then continue to add more elastic bands down the length of the hair of the ponytail. Hence this will stretch out your curls. You do as many bands as you like around the whole head. Typically 4-8 sections.
• Pinning Ponytail: This is somewhat like banding, but you put your hair in one or two ponytails and then pinning the loose ends down with several clips (like the elastics in the banding method) to stretch the hair.

• Bantu Knots Out: You can use bantu knots to stretch your hair by sectioning off the hair in diamond, triangle or square shapes and twisted into knots  and then after it dries, the knots are taking out to achieve defined loosely curly hair.

• Heat: Ok you know the last choice is the most obvious. Using a blow dryer to loosen up the curls, or a hot comb or flat iron to straighten the curls completely. Using heat is potential to damaging hair, but if you use the right tools and heat protectant you can minimize the damage.