Stretching Natural Hair

For black women with natural hair, shrinkage can be a major pain in the butt!  Not only because it can hide up to 75% of your hair's true length, but also because our curls/coils/kinks tend to get single strand knots and other annoyances when allowed to draw up onto itself.  

Take my bff Ashley who just did her BC (big chop).  If she stretches out coils of hair, it's WAY longer than it actually LOOKS, but because of her texture (4b/4c), it shrinks up drastically.  This texture of hair has a tendency to be fragile and drier, so keeping it moisturized daily (water based spray, hair butter or oils to seal) will be the best bet to healthy strands.  So while her hair looks short, that's mostly shrinkage (I'd say that the texture she has can shrink 50-80%, thoroughly hiding its length).  What can someone with tightly coiled hair do about the shrinkage issue?  Wearing twists/twistouts or braids/braidouts will allow the hair to be stretched out to not only show its length but to keep knots and tangles at bay.  Check out how this girl with 4B hair grew it to waist length: http://www.kisforkinky.com/2010/11/miss-lala/   Also, here's a braiding/braidout tutorial for you girlies to use!

Basically you wash your hair with a sulfate free shampoo (focus on that scalp so that it's clean and you won't have product build up), do an oil rinse with olive oil, condition and detangle with a slippery conditioner, apply leave in conditioner, then braid/twist with a moisturizer.  You can rock your hair out and about with the twists/braids or cover them with a satin do-rag as protection from the weather elements and rock a wig over them!  

My hair experiences shrinkage in the back with its tight 4a coils, but for the most part, it doesn't shrink up all that much.  I'm not really sure what "type" my hair is other than 4a coils in the back and some 3C curls in the middle and around the front that's surrounded by undefined fluffy pieces.  I did a wash n go the other day with a little Kinky Curly Curling Custard raked through and my hair dried similar to this lady's but longer: 

When I do twists on my hair, THAT'S when I experience shrinkage...twists done on wet hair tends to make my hair look about 60% shorter than what it actually is.  My friend Candy was shocked that my hair looked so big/had grown from when she saw me in NYC a couple of months ago, but really the hair was "hiding" because it was in a wet/tight twist out, so that style isn't the best for my texture if I actually want the big hair that I covet.  What I've found to be the best stretching method on my hair is what's called pineappling (the name comes from looking like the fruit with your hair scrunchied up on top of your head!) as seen here by QuestForThePerfectCurl:

Basically what I did for my pineapple was to wash my hair with Pure Life Aloe shampoo/conditioner 2 in 1 with olive oil added, conditioned with Curls Coconut Sublime conditioner (use ref code WGUX0HOU if you buy anything from Curls!) , added Kinky Curly Knot Today Leave-In, then raked through Kinky Curly Curling Custard before pulling my hair back into a scrunchie/ponytail holder and placing a hair wrap on the front to smooth back the edges.  It came out beautiful and stretched the next morning, big curly hair. Generally I'd always had to have a twistout for a couple of days before it fluffed into big hair and even then it wasn't as curly/defined as this time (showing my own curl pattern as opposed to a twistout pattern). 

I didn't do the pineapple nightly like I probably should have, just threw my hair under a satin bonnet after fluffing with some Curls Milkshake. The curling custard is holding the curl pattern defined so far (about 4 days), so that's a good thing and I'll probably do the process over again soon then pineapple nightly instead of just the first night with wet hair.  For girls who have 3B-4A hair, I recommend pineappling!  Not the SEXIEST thing to wear if you have a lover around, but it does make for bouncy pretty big hair the next day, lol.  Your call on if it's worth the MAJOR side eye that you are sure to receive from anyone in the house.  

Happy curls!  Hope that this was helpful :) 

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