Stretching Natural Hair



By DiscoveringNatural

Have you ever washed your child's hair and after washing it, the size magically drastically reduces? Well, Welcome to Shrinkage and Natural Hair. You can't run away from it. Your child's hair will shrink.  There are many ways to reduce the amount of shrinkage you get.

Sometimes, we do love to embrace our shrinkiness by doing cute styles that works with it versus against it.  However, whenever we do want to take advantage of the length, here are some ways that we have been able to reduce shrinkage without heat.

Banding

This process involves using several hair ties to band the hair to allow it to dry in a stretched manner. Click here to read more about this technique.

Braiding

Not only can braiding help with shrinkage, when you unbraid the hair, you can also get a nice wavy look. To ensure that this method works, clip the base of your hair with a bobby pin and then wrap the braids around your head.

Stretched twists

This is similar to the braiding process. The only difference is to do a two strand twist instead of braids. After twisting the hair, use a bobby pin on each twist to wrap the twist around the hair

Threading

Although this method takes longer to do, it does work pretty well. Threading, or African Threading, involves using a thread to wrap the hair in different sections.  This can be worn as a style or the thread can be undone to show the stretched hair.  Click here to read more about this technique. Click here to view a video on how to create a fancy threaded protective style.

If you are feeling adventurous, you can try using CurlFormers to stretch your child's hair. Click here to see how we do it.

Other ways that shrinking can be reduce using heat:

• Ribbon Stretching
• Roller setting
• Blow Drying (Click here to see how I use the tension method to blow dry Big Sis' hair)
• Straightening with Flat Iron