Natural Hair Products and Your Hair

Aside from actually working, effective natural hair products and accessories support three necessary aspects of curly hair growth:

Moisture

Hair products that promote growth really moisturize your hair. Curly hair is dry. Brittle and dry hair breaks off and is unforgiving when it tangles. When your hair is moisturized, the hair is more pliable and easy to manipulate, but without moisture, the hair will fight back when being detangled and break in the process. So natural hair products that benefit hair the most shower curly hair with the most moisture possible.

Read an ingredient review for the moisturizing conditioner: L'Occitane - Aromachologie Repairing Dry and Damaged Hair Conditioner--8.4OZ for WOMEN

Breakage Prevention

Not only does dry hair cause breakage, but so do certain styling accessories. For years, I used to routinely wear a flat metal hair clip for a ponytail or bun style and I often wondered why in that exact place, where I snapped the clip closed, this area of my hair was shorter than the rest. At first I thought my hair was just like that. But one day, I lost my clips (and was too cheap to buy more) so I needed to figure out another style for a while, and noticed my hair started to grow back in that area. Sometimes we can be using accessories and natural hair products that are hurting our hair and because we’ve always used them, we don’t even think about it.

When I transitioned to being natural, there were a lot of styling practices that I carried over from my relaxed hair days. These practices were bad for my relaxed hair and even worse for my natural hair. For example, I didn’t cover my hair at night when my hair was relaxed. I thought I didn’t have to, because I could sleep on my hair, and still comb through it the next day. Not so with natural hair. Now, if I don’t moisturize, twist up and put a cap on my curly fro for the night, my hair will rub up against other hair and create a beehive of knots and tangles which will not be sorted out by the time I have to get to work the next day unless there is a scissor involved.

Shea butter is a great way to seal moisture into your hair making it soft and shiny. Read more about this wonder product here.

Hair to Hair Interaction

Effective natural hair products and accessories also reduce hair to hair interaction. I know the phrase sounds bizarre, but researchers have found that when the hairs' cuticle layers rub up against each other, there can be lifting of the cuticles causing damage. Remember we don’t even want to see the cortex of your hair strand. That’s not healthy hair.

And curly hair knows this interaction really well, because it just naturally intertwines. That’s what curly hair does. When hair isn’t set at night and covered, during the night, hair will rub against other hair and your pillow causing knots, damage and the beginnings of fractured hair.

Picking the right products and using them appropriately is definitely important for natural hair growth. While hair products work differently for each curl, I will test some natural hair products here by integrating them into my current routine and will see what happens. I know that I’d like to try some products like emu oil. My last relaxer involved a chemical burn near the area of my temples and hair doesn’t live there anymore, but emu oil may be able to help that. So I think I’ll try that one first and share the results.