Last updated on August 19th, 2022 at 04:32 pm

Using protective styles to protect hair during the remainder of the summer.

Summer comes and goes really quickly. As of the writing of this post, we are about midway through.

I’ve been embracing the wash and go for most of the entire month of July and while I love the look of the wash and go, I have some concerns that I’m leaving my hair out waaaay too much. Plus, when my hair is loose I tend to “play” in it. So, I decided this would be a great time (mid-summer) to return to what I know helps with retaining length…Protective Styling.

Many naturals say they can’t protective style. They don’t like to or they don’t really see the benefit. Protective styling is a personal choice but for my natural hair journey, I find it very helpful. The key to it being successful is finding protective styles you will stick with.

I’ve tried, twists, mini-twists, small twists, buns and french rolls. Each of these protective styles is great but I’ve found that I have issues with them and these issues cause them not to be very protective at all.

Twists

Twists get too fuzzy for my liking and the smaller the twist, the more tangling and “webbing” at the root I encounter. I also tend to take twists out too quickly (think 3 days!) It doesn’t matter if I spent hours twisting my hair. I just can’t seem to like them long enough to keep them in.

Buns

Buns are so cute and I love to “recover” an old twist out/braid out by styling it in a bun. Unfortunately, when rocking buns, they don’t last longer than a day. I need to restyle the bun on a daily basis and also find myself finger detangling more often to mold the bun in the way I want. Well, that’s not very protective!

Braids

Braids tend to give me the biggest bang for my protective styling buck, if you will. It not only takes a while to braid my hair, it takes twice the amount of time to unbraid them! Because of the time it takes to unbraid, I am more apt to leave them in longer. Braids also stay looking neat for much longer than twists.

So, I shared all of that to share that I’m kicking off this summer protective styling series with my hair in braids as a protective style! Check out the two videos below. They share my braiding process:

UPDATE: I figured out a way to do a hybrid sort of summer natural hair style for summer that helps prevent some of the shrinkage I don’t care for. Check it out here: Easiest of summer hairstyles for natural hair