How to Blow Dry Your Kid's Natural Hair in 4 Steps

By DiscoveringNatural

Blow Drying natural hair can give you a stretched look in a shorter amount of time than other stretching options such as twisting, threading, braiding or banding, which can take a few hours. However, in order to ensure that your child's hair doesn't get damaged by the heat, I will recommend you take the following precautionary steps.

1. Blow Dry on Clean Detangled Hair ONLY
Prior to blow drying, make sure that the hair is clean and properly detangled. 

2. Pre-Treat Hair with a Protein Treatment
A protein treatment helps to strengthen the hair, giving it more strength and the ability to withstand any damage which weaker hair strands might not be able to handle.  

3. Use a Heat Protectant
Apply a silicone based heat protectant on the hair prior to applying heat. Silicone provides a "film like" structure on the hair surface, an extra layer which will protect the outer most layer of the hair - the cuticle from a heat damage. 

4. Use the Tension Method to Blow Dry
The best way to eliminate breakage and to reduce damage which is often caused by the conventional method of brushing/combing the hair as you blow dry it is to do a Tension method. The tension method is when you hold the ends of your hair while you blow dry that particular section. The video below shows a demonstration on how to achieve this.  

The Tension Method

Please remember that eventhough blow drying can be very convenient, frequent heat application can be damaging to the hair, as the application of heat changes the chemical structure/bonds of our hair, which can be overwhelming to the health of our hair if its done too often.

How often do you blow dry your child's natural hair?