By now, we all know that long, healthy relaxed hair is a thing that some of us don’t get to see because it can be quite tedious to achieve. But like everything else, once you learn the dos and don’ts, all you need to do is be consistent and then it’s easy from there. However, sometimes the line between what we should and shouldn’t do gets blurred and we’re really not sure what advice we should take.
No worries! Picking out the bad habits is a piece of cake, but just in case you’re still unsure, below are 5 habits to avoid when trying to grow long relaxed hair!
Stretching Your Relaxer Longer Than Your Hair Can Handle
Stretching your relaxer helps to avoid over-processing, thinning, breakage, split ends, and overall unhealthy hair. A lot of women stick to relaxing their hair no more than 3 times a year because they believe that having time in between relaxers helps with hair health and growth.
However, stretching relaxers months at a time does not jive well with certain hair textures and types. These women actually see breakage, shedding, dryness, and other damage because they’ve lost the harmonious balance between new growth and relaxed hair.
To avoid damage, you need to figure out how long you can actually stretch relaxers and stick to it! Just because someone can stretch their relaxer for 6 months, doesn’t mean that you can get away with it too.
While you stretch your relaxer, write down the changes in your hair and determine up to what point you are willing to go. When you figure out how long you’d like to stretch, construct an appropriate regimen for yourself!
Trimming Your Hair Too Often
Getting a trim every few weeks or months is one of those things that women, in general, try to avoid because we love our length far too much to willingly give it up. On the other hand, if we don’t trim our hair, we’ll most likely experience raggedy split ends and start losing more hair than we would if we just had gotten that trim.
So we get our hair trimmed regularly out of fear of split ends, and what happens? We end up trimming way too often! We can easily fall into the habit of trimming the same amount of hair every time we go get a cut and sometimes, that’s just too much.
If you’re properly taking care of your hair and retaining length, you may only need a little bit of hair taken off after your initial trim. If you’re cutting the same amount of hair every time you get a trim, you might be cutting perfectly healthy hair which means you won’t see any growth.
