Simple Heatless Stretching For My Wild And Free Afro.

Like every naturalista, I like to have my hair stretched out now and again but would rather do it without any direct heat. I've tried a number of heatless methods and so far, the best method has been threading. The thing with threading though is that it takes a bit of time and my arms start to ache and I start to get cranky!

I was watching a YouTube video from 'TheChicNatural' and I saw her do something which seemed so easy and effective and I was determined to try it out! In her video, she washes, conditions and then puts her hair into 4 ponytails, twists them and then pins each twist across her hair in an opposite direction so the hair stretches while it dries.

I tried it the first time a couple of washes ago and I loved it!! I initially did what she did which was use bands to hold the ponytails tight at the base but because my strands are so fine and the hair in my crown is very coarse and dry, I noticed I had some tenderness there and breakage! Err no that was not going to be happening!

So I decided to increase my portions to about 8 and instead of using a band to get the base stretched, I would braid the base and then twist the rest. Another trick to getting the most out of this is not to use too much product in the hair while it is still damp and to make sure the hair is THOROUGHLY detangled.

I then pinned each twist in opposite directions across my head and by morning, my hair had dried in a stretched state! No arm aches, no long lengths of thread to worry about and definitely no heat damage to worry about!!

This has been my go to stretching method when I wash my hair and I've been rocking my hair in a wild n free afro! I'm currently in North Carolina and there's no choking humidity like there is typically in Lagos so my hair doesn't race back to my skull and I still have a pretty decent look by the end of the day  - Halleluyah! Loll.

So wearing my 'fro without a care now until I get back home and then back into protective styles it is!!