One of the most common complaints comments that I get from people who are newly natural is that their hair is way too thick. Personally I never really thought of this as a bad thing, flashbacks of my thin relaxed hair constantly reminds me to love my thick coils, kinks and curls and enjoy what nature gave me.
Having said that I can see how being natural for the first time in years, even decades for some women, can be overwhelming. This is especially true for you ladies just starting your natural hair journeys which means there is an ever present temptation to either go back to relaxers or to rely on heat too much (you know yourselves!).
Another common complaint about natural hair is the shrinkage. Trust me, I know the frustration of high shrinkage hair. One of my wishes when I was first transitioning was to have hair that was BSL when shrunken. Even though my stretched hair reaches waist length now, my hair still shrinks all the way up to my shoulders. By my estimation I would have to grow hair down to my knees to have BSL shrunken hair, clearly that’s not something that’s going to happen!
Banding is one of those techniques that I was aware of from the very beginning of my own journey but honestly at the time a search on youtube only turned out a few 4a/b ladies doing this method with results that looked more like picked out afro’s than true blow outs. I assumed at the time that us kinky* haired ladies just couldn’t get a proper blow out look without using heat and truthfully I forgot about banding.
A few weeks ago I decided to revisit banding as I discovered that if done correctly it’s actually a really good way to stretch even the tightest kinks and coils. Just in case you are wondering why you need to stretch your hair out, you will know that natural hair tends to retain more length when it is stretched as this prevents majority of tangles and single strand knots.
So without further ado, here’s how the banding method is done.
Put a bunch of frizz serum in your hair, pull into low pony,braid ends really tight,leave in for abt a day nd a half-2days…take out nd shake it loose
I’m been thinking about doing a transition to natural hair for a while. I have some questions. How often should I band my hair? Do I really need to apply the leave in conditioner every night?