Hello Lovelies!
In the quest for long hair, many ladies come to realize it’s not how fast you can make your hair grow, but it’s how much you can keep the hair you do grow. The proper term for this “realization” is length retention. You can grow 6 inches of hair a year, but if you’re frying, dyeing, and damaging your hair on a frequent basis, you won’t retain much if any of those 6 inches of hair you’ve grown. The key to retaining more length and reaching your long hair goals is reducing the opportunities your hair has to sustain damage, split, and break off. Most hair breakage is caused by the things we do to our hair. From curling to bleaching, most human hair breaks as a result of the ways we choose to style it, so if you want to reach your goals of growing long hair, protective styling should be a mainstay in your hair care regimen.
What is a Protective Style?
Protective hairstyles protect the ends of the hair, the oldest and most vulnerable portion of the hair strand, and reduces the frequency the hair needs to be styled and manipulated. Protective hairstyles can range from a simple bun to elaborate updos, but as long as the hair is up and off of the shoulders and the ends of the hair are tucked away, it pretty much counts as a protective style. Protective styles are low-maintenance, simple, and easy hairstyles that ladies who wish to grow long hair can wear for days at a time (some hair types can wear protective styles for week or months at a time) without having to restyle their hair.
In my opinion, a protective hairstyle is also a hairstyle that doesn’t require the use of direct heat, such as a curling iron or hand-held drier, with the exception of braided hairstyles for curlier hair textures. Using these styling tools to create a protective style is counterproductive. The purpose of a protective hairstyle is to help your hair retain moisture and remove styling tools and styling methods from your hair care regimen that could lead to extensive damage.
How do Protective Styles Facilitate Hair Growth?
Protective hairstyles won’t make your hair grow faster because nothing will make your hair grow faster. What protective styles do is basically saves us from ourselves; let me explain. Barring illness or some other non-controllable factor, the main reason most of us don’t retain length and grow long hair is because our hair is breaking off as fast as it grows. Everytime you even touch your hair, you have the potential to cause damage to your tresses. When you wear a hairstyle that requires you to physically handle your hair two to three times a week at most, you drastically reduce the opportunities you have to damage your hair.
Protective styles also facilitate growth by keep the ends of your hair moist. Have you ever taken a bun down and noticed that the ends of your hair were extremely soft and moisturized? That’s because your hair was tucked away and able to keep most of it’s moisture that would otherwise be lost to the air or soaked up by your clothing as your hair rests against your back. Well moisturized hair is another key to retaining length and growing long hair because hair that is moist is much more flexible and less likely to split or break. Every moment that the ends of your hair are exposed, moisture is slowly leaving your hair, but keeping those ends tucked away and hidden will help the oldest portion of your hair keep much needed moisture for longer periods of time.
The power of protective, low-manipulation hairstyles are most evident among children. I’m sure most of us would agree that very few mothers are styling their little girls’ hair with heat, hair dyes, and elaborate hairstyles that call for vigorous brushing and combing. Most little girls wear very simple and easy to maintain hairstyles that require very little manipulation of the hair. So, a young girl’s hair has the optimal chance to retain length and grow long because a young girl’s hair isn’t exposed to damaging hairstyling practices or damaging hair tools. Us older gals can experience the same success in terms of our long hair goals by going back to the simplicity and ease of hairstyles from our younger years.
So if you want to retain more length than you ever have, I urge you to give protective styles a try. You don’t have to wear these styles everyday, but incorporating protective hairstyles into your hair care regimen will help you fight hair breakage and help you make some serious gains in terms of length retention.
