Many times when the issue of protecting your hair comes up, we talk more about the hairstyles that protect your hair and not the ones that destroy it – we need to talk about that more. Interestingly, some of the hairstyles we think to protect hair actually damage it.
Unprotective hairstyles are those that damage your scalp, weaken your hair and destroy your hairline.
No hairstyle pulls at your hair more than Ghana braids. This is because it usually starts with the smallest hair strand at the fore and keeps pulling the hair back. By the time you want to loose the braids, half of your hair will be gone.
We know for years cornrows have been marketed as a protective hairstyle but not with the way hairstylists make them. Cornrows are so tight that they damage the hair at a molecular level. Have you ever made cornrows, and you could barely turn your head, and it had bumps, that’s a clear sign it’s damaging your hair?
One of the worst things we’ve seen is when women make braids, whether big or small, that are really tight and then pack it up in a bun, they are pulling their hair from the scalp. At the end of the day, they are likely to develop traction alopecia which is hair loss gotten from the trauma repeatedly damaging the hair.
Having curly baby hair might look nice but always using edge control will just damage your hair, this is because most people don’t wash it off and that causes hair loss.
You might think wearing a wig is protecting your hair, but it’s destroying it because you are not taking care of your hair underneath. You still need to wash and moisturize your hair underneath the wig; it’s also important to wear a wig cap.
