How Over Manipulation of Natural Hair Causes Breakage
Last updated on April 28th, 2019 at 09:28 pm
Natural hair is fragile by nature. Fine natural hair is even more fragile. That’s why when it comes to “handling” your hair, you must be gentle.
Manipulation is necessary to care for, maintain and style your hair but over manipulation will cause breakage. If your goal is to grow your hair to the longest length possible, you can not over manipulate your strands. Continuing to do so on your natural hair will cause breakage and the sad part is it’s avoidable.
Now, for full disclosure.
While I have been able to maintain length on my fine natural hair, there would be a lot more retaining if I could keep my hands out of my hair! I have been so guilty of styling playing in my hair way too much. You probably are too if you just can’t get enough of your natural hair #Guilty
One of the ways you can defeat this “hand in hair syndrome” (hash tag HIHS) is to utilize protective styling.
Protective Styling to Prevent Breakage
Protective styling is grossly under rated in the natural hair community. Some people don’t put that much stock in it. However, it’s proven to help with length retention time and time again.
Protective styling doesn’t have to be difficult either. You can do simple styles that don’t require much manipulation. For those of us with fine natural hair, the best protective styles are easy to do and should be kept in for about a week vs protective styling for weeks on end.
In the video below by KaShEeRaLaTaSh on Youtube, a timeless protective style is shared. You can put your hair up in a way that it can be maintained for over a week if done right:
This article was originally published in 2012 and has been updated to provide additional information.
Such an awesome tutorial! Thanks so much for posting! Does she have fine natural hair as well? From here, I believe she does but I’m not entirely certain.
Yes, I believe so. It’s just that her density is out of this world so you can’t tell!
That was a nice tutorial. I have my daughter’s hair just like that most of the time, but I also twist the front!
I know. It’s cute right?!
Thanks for stopping by. I need to take a break from writing to deal with a couple family crises
Interesting bun and really elegant looking.
I know right. I like how she made the individual twists. I’m not going to do it this weekend but next. I’m actually straightening my hair tomorrow!
I have my hair in a bun but I do take it down at night to let my scalp breath. I do like my scalp massages with my favorite Jane Carter scalp oil 2-3x a week. I also like to moisturize and seal my ends every night. The hairstyle in the video is cute.
I imagine she does some sort of misting of the hair and a scalp massage without taking out the twists.
I currently have in mini twists for this very reason… low manipulation!
Mini twists take forever to do! I am going to definitely do this style in a week or so though. But tomorrow……STRAIGHTENING!