Summer Tips for Maintaining Your Wash and Go

Last updated on September 2nd, 2022 at 07:48 pm

In the article just before this one I shared some fun ways to style a wash and go. Now, let’s look at some summer tips for maintaining your wash and go. Actually two of the three summer wash and go maintenance tips can be applied any time you do this style. I just like to reserve the wash and go for the summer.

When it comes to maintaining your wash and go between wash days, there are a few “rules” I like to follow:

1. Keep your curls stretched
2. Make sure your hair is always moisturized
3. Protect your hair from summer activities

We’ll look at each of these so called “rules” shortly but one important thing to highlight is you don’t want to go too long before washing your hair when you do a wash and go.

I know you’ve seen videos of ladies talking about how they get 7 day, 10 day and even more days of their wash and go. Goodie for them.

Why You Don’t Want a 7 Day (or longer) Wash and Go

If you have fine hair, you do not want to go that long before washing your hair after setting your wash and go. Here are the reasons why:

• Tangles are increased due to shed hair that’s not released but rather, wrapped within the curls
• Your hair will get very dry. Yes, you can spritz with water or a moisturizer BUT, hydration occurs on wash day when you open those cuticles and deep condition your hair.

Now that you know why you don’t really want to keep your wash and go running for too long, let’s look at the ways you can maintain your wash and go throughout the summer months.

Side bar: I only like to do wash and go’s in the summer when the weather is warm

Keep your curls stretched

The first thing you want to do for effective summer wash and go maintenance is to keep your hair stretched.

While it may seem counterintuitive to do in the summer time with the humidity and all, it’s actually necessary.

If you allow your hair to just shrink in its wash and go state, tangles and knots will occur. You don’t want that for a two reasons:

• It will impact your length retention
• Wash day will be much more difficult to manage

One thing to note is, stretching your curls is something you’ll need to do either nightly or every other night. It depends on how much your hair shrinks in response to the heat.

How to stretch your natural curls

Before moving on to the next summer wash and go maintenance tip, here’s my recommendation for stretching your curls in a wash and go when it’s hot out:

Banding Method

The best way I have found to stretch natural curls so that the curl pattern isn’t completely ruined is with the banding method.

Before I go to bed each night, I like to loosely secure my hair in 2 ponytails with thick seamless bands. Then, I place bands down the length of each ponytail.

Notice there’s a lot of space between each of the bands. This is to ensure that my hair is stretched but not too much.

If I were to do a wash and go any other time than when it’s humid (this is very rare), I would put my hair in a pineapple (high ponytail) secured with a scarf.

Make sure your hair is always moisturized

The next tip for maintaining your wash and go in the summer (as well as any time) is to make sure your hair is always moisturized.

Even though there may be humidity in the air, that’s not enough to keep your hair moisturized. It is completely possible for your hair to dry out in the summer. Plus, if your hair isn’t properly moisturized, it will get frizzy.

How to moisturize hair for summer heat

Some ways to keep your hair moisturized in the summer include:

• Not skimping on deep conditioning on wash day
• Misting your hair with water followed by sealing with a light weight oil (Jojoba and Argan oils work well). This may however, not work well if you have low porosity hair
• Spritzing your hair with a refresher spray like this one:

Protect your hair from summer activities

The final tip to help you maintain your wash and go in the summer is to make sure you protect your hair – specifically from summertime activities:

• swimming
• sun bathing
• outdoor activities

In the summertime we tend to spend much more time outdoors and engaging in activities that over expose our hair to the sun.

The sun can really do damage to your hair. Especially, when you are exposing it to the sun on a regular basis. Therefore, you have to protect it regularly.

How to protect your hair from the sun

In order to protect your hair from the sun’s damaging UV rays, here are a few things you can do:

• Use sunscreen products for hair
• Use natural oils with natural SPF protection: Check out Natural Sunscreen for Hair Protection
• Wear a summer hat
• When swimming, wear a swim cap
• If you don’t want to wear a swim cap, saturate your hair with plain water before getting in a pool. This will minimize the amount of chlorine your hair absorbs
• Wash and deep condition your hair after swimming or being exposed to chlorine
• Limit the amount of time you spend in the sun

The wash and go is a great summer hairstyle to help you sport your beautiful natural curls. I hope you find these summer wash and go maintenance tips useful to help you care for and maintain your wash and go through the season.

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