Top 10 Protective Styling Mistakes you have been making

Protective styles are great when worn and they keep our hair from going through lots of manipulation but they can either be beneficial or damaging. Some people have achieved amazing results from protective styling while some others have only gotten damaging results which alters the purpose of protective styling.

Let’s discuss the top 10 mistakes you didn’t know you have been making with your protective styles.

1. Your Hairstyles are too Tight: Any hairstyle that makes you feel so much pain on your scalp and forehead or makes you take painkillers after you get your hair done, that is a sign that your hairstyle is tight.

Tight hairstyles doesn’t make your hairstyle look super neat or beautiful but rather, they put a lot of tension on your scalp and can damage your hair follicles causing hair to forcefully fall out from your hair follicles resulting to extreme hairloss and thinning.

Sometimes, it might be very difficult or takes a longer time to regrow the lost hair due to tight hair styling.

2. Neglecting your Hair while in Protective Style: When you put your hair in a protective style, that doesn’t mean you should  forget your hair or keep your hair care routine aside. In fact, it is when you should take hair care routine more seriously especially when you use an extension in making your protective hairstyle.

Depending on how well your hair retains moisture, you still need to moisturize and seal your hair in protective styles to avoid risk of breakage.

3. Skipping Washdays: Protective Styles shouldn’t prevent you from keeping your scalp your clean. Hair doesn’t grow from a dirty scalp. Your scalp will definitely get dirty and itchy from build ups, dusts and dirts and that’s when your shampoo comes in handy. Yes you can shampoo your hair while it’s still in a protective style. When it’s time for your Washdays, you can still shampoo, condition and moisturize your hair. Don’t wait till you’ve taken down your protective style to wash your hair.

4. No Night Time Routine: Just because your hair is in a protective style doesn’t necessarily mean that you can jump right into bed at night without tending to your hair. The edge controls you have on your edges should be wiped off before going to bed because some edge controls or gels contain some harsh chemicals that can dry out and break the hair, also remoisturise your edges after wiping or rinsing out the edge control. Though your hair is in a protective style, you still need to wrap your hair in your satin or silk bonnet to avoid your hair getting frizzy while sleeping.

5. Too Much Gel/Hair Wax:  Your hairstylist may be using way too much gels or wax when installing your protective style. It is true that gels help makes the hairstyle look more sleek and neat but too much of it comes with gel build up and flakes with results to itching.

6. Trimming Real Hair that Sticks out of your Hairstyle: Most hairstylist makes this mistake a lot. Trimming off those hair that stick out of your braids or twists only tells on your hair when you finally take the hairstyle down. Tell your hairstylist to be careful enough to hide your real hair when installing the braids or twists so that there won’t be any need for a trim because you’ll notice a lot of breakage when you finally take down the style. Instead of a trim, he or she should use a mousse to keep the hair together and neater.

7. Repeating Same Style Back – Back: Making same hairstyle all over again can cause breakage or hairloss around some parts of your hair. Cornrow for example are always pulling on your edges and could lead to hairloss around your hairline and Updos like high bun, high puff cause breakage in your crown area, edges and nape. Doing it repeatedly is not advisable. Switch up styles

8. Wrong Protective Style Take Down: Rushing to take down your protective style is the last thing you should do because you’ll only end up damaging your own hair from cutting your own hair when trying to cut the extension to ripping out your hair maybe to due frustrated. Your old protective style will have lots of build up and tangles around the root and before taking it down, you need to be in your right state of mind in order to be safe as possible. Water, conditioner, or oil should always come in handy to reduce the chances of breakage.

9. Keeping your Protective Style in for too Long:  The ideal duration to keep a protective style is 6-8 weeks. Anything more than that will cause your new growth to tangle up no matter how you try to refresh it to make it look more presentable. The tangle will eventually lead to breakage or hairloss and when that happens, you’ll end up not retaining as much length as possible.

10. Making Hairstyles that are too Tiny:  Tiny hairstyles increase the chances of breakage because the take down can sometimes be frustrating and making detangling much more difficult. Imagine parting your hair in tiny sections and then braiding or twisting it with an extension that has more weight than your real hair. This can easily pull and force your hair to be uprooted from your scalp because your real hair sectioned in very tiny sections can’t withstand the weight from the extension. Example of tiny hairstyles to avoid is 1 million braids.