How do you open the most nightmarish tangles?..

[Priska]

Of course you should not get them but sometimes there might happen something that is a surprise and changes all your plans... (sick children for example...)

I just opened most horrible tangles with olive oil, vinegar and relatively good (market) conditioners. It was a little bit scary because it was so difficult and I could not get them totally open in shower, especially because I didn't have very much time, but then something finally happened when I added more and more all these liquids, and finally I could get my hair quite clear after shower when it was drying. But is there some trick that I should be aware of?..
It would also be great to hear of your experiences of clearing the worst tangles... :)

[foreveryours]

If you have time, let it dry so you can pick it apart. Water swells the hair strands and makes them "rougher" and more grabby. A wet bedsheet is far more difficult to untie than a dry one.

[aloewurly]

I rarely get them now, but when I had long hair in the past I worked through mine with kid's detangling hair spray and fingercombing. Using a regular comb just tightened the knots, but with my fingers I could feel the tangled hairs individually and loosen them with less breakage. Also putting away the rest of the hair (with claw clips or just in ponytails) so they didn't get in the way.

[neko_kawaii]

My kid gets nasty tangles. Easiest to detangle when dry. Start at the bottom isolate a tangled section and gently pull it sideways to open up some space in the knot. Use the first tine in a wide toothed comb, the handle of a rat tail comb, or a thin hair stick to insert very low in the loosened tangle and slid it down the hair. If it tightens instead of loosens, restart lower. Sometimes pulling single hairs out of tough tangles is the way to go, working small sections at a time.

I keep thinking I should get a video of detangling my kid, but it isn’t as bad as it used to be.

[AmaryllisRed]

My kid gets nasty tangles. Easiest to detangle when dry. Start at the bottom isolate a tangled section and gently pull it sideways to open up some space in the knot. Use the first tine in a wide toothed comb, the handle of a rat tail comb, or a thin hair stick to insert very low in the loosened tangle and slid it down the hair. If it tightens instead of loosens, restart lower. Sometimes pulling single hairs out of tough tangles is the way to go, working small sections at a time.

I keep thinking I should get a video of detangling my kid, but it isn’t as bad as it used to be.

This is exactly what I do with mine and my daughters' and a better explanation than I could have written. I will add, it's harder for me to apply this method on my own hair when the tangles aren't low enough to pull over my shoulder and get eyes on.

[Priska]

Thank you for your answers! :) I forgot to say that I was having a flax seed -chia seed gel - agave syrup -natural treatment in my head maybe 20 minutes before I started to solve the tangles... usually these gels give a very good slip for tangle resolving in shower. So I don't actually know why I tell this, because this time they didn't help. 😆 Or then they did in some weird way after this treatment and after rinsing it away... 😉

[MusicalSpoons]

Another vote for pulling sideways. For me the *worst* tangles when I get them (it's not often I get really stubborn ones) are caused by lint, and the second-worse and far more common cause is shed hairs. So pulling sideways to loosen then trying to liberate a hair or two at a time tends to help.

[Bri-Chan]

I've tried a lot of combination, but for me dry hair + a good brush is the winner. Making my hair wet in some way make the tangle more difficult to remove.

[EdG]

Bad tangles are invariably held together by lint. You need to get the lint out.

This is easiest when the hair is full of sebum. Dampen the hair slightly. Use a wide-tooth wooden comb, get the tines underneath the tangle, and comb it in a perpendicular direction away from the scalp. Clean the comb frequently. Finger-detangling can get out tangles that rotate and pass through the tines of a comb.
Ed

[Ylva]

Another vote for pulling sideways. For me the *worst* tangles when I get them (it's not often I get really stubborn ones) are caused by lint, and the second-worse and far more common cause is shed hairs. So pulling sideways to loosen then trying to liberate a hair or two at a time tends to help.

This might as well have been written by me. So: seconding!

I don't go out of my way to detangle, though. I will quite readily whip out the scissors if a tangle takes longer than a few minutes to get through. I had to cut out a few this past summer, but that was mostly following events where I had my hair loose and did some crazy things (such as headbanging and dancing).

[lapushka]

If I happen to come across a rat's nest, which is rare, but on occasion, I get those too. And I say it this way because I double condition, oil rinse, and do LOC/LCO, so I kick plenty of moisture in there and ever since doing that, it pays off. But still, before washing, I can get some nasty tangles from a week's worth of not brushing or combing.

I just use my wet brush dupe and it glides right on over the really bad stuff but through most loose "knots". The really bad stuff is usually a knot with 4 to 5 hairs that I just have to grab the rattail (metal) of my small tooth comb for. And it gets it out really smoothly. A needle for mending socks and sewing knitwear together (blunt tip), will work too.

But I am just gentle, it's the only thing that works in all of this: being gentle with whatever it is you have gotten yourself into.

[GrowlingCupcake]

I get a lot of tangles. Finding a good detangler was amazing for me (I use Nightblooming's Selkie Detangler), and significantly cut down the a) the time I spent detangling, b) the number of times I needed help detangling my hair, and c) the number of knots I cut out. I spray it liberally, let it dry so it's only a bit damp, and then detangle. Finding a brush that works for me (wet brush) was also really helpful.

Also, if detangling from the bottom doesn't work for you, try very gently from the roots. Detangling ends first makes my hair break, and doesn't work so I come at it from the top, gently pushing tangles down as much as they can go, and then working on individual tangles. I still pull sideways but coming from above, not below. I often switch to from the end after detangling most of the knot. You have to be very gentle, though!

I'll also use a hair pin or needle if I need to loosen a bad knot. Those are usually way too tight for a comb end.

The worst tangles that have been unpicked used a lot of conditioner; I just let it sit there for a good 15 minutes at least, and kept adding more.

[GoddesJourney]

My kid gets nasty tangles. Easiest to detangle when dry. Start at the bottom isolate a tangled section and gently pull it sideways to open up some space in the knot. Use the first tine in a wide toothed comb, the handle of a rat tail comb, or a thin hair stick to insert very low in the loosened tangle and slid it down the hair. If it tightens instead of loosens, restart lower. Sometimes pulling single hairs out of tough tangles is the way to go, working small sections at a time.

I keep thinking I should get a video of detangling my kid, but it isn’t as bad as it used to be.

Another vote for this method. Sometimes I also have luck pulling a single hair up, like right back out the way it came into the knot (while holding the rest in place between two fingers). Some parts of knots are actually just twists, but they behave like knots if you pull sideways. Pulling hairs one or two at a time back out the top while keeping the rest from trying to follow in a way that tightens the whole contraption is a good option if the sideways method hits a literal snag. (Haha.)

Anyway, always a good try. I've gotten better at analyzing knots. Once I know what kind of knot it is (or that specific section if it's a combination knot) it's much easier to undo it.

[foreveryours]

This is so timely. For the last week, I've suddenly been experiencing massive very diffuse tangling, not just a few strands but like all of them, high up on my right side, like artificial spider webbing used as props. I think I might have to go back to combing every day if this becomes a regular thing but I'm going to try clarifying today to see if that helps as it's been over 6 months.

[luxurioushair]

Focus on the strands that are wrapping horizontally across the others. Remove the horizontal ones from the tangled area and make them fall vertically again. Use a tiny bit of oil of course. It works like magic.

[foreveryours]

Success!

It took me nearly an hour before leaving for work (didn't help) yesterday morning for me to get my comb through this tangled mess so I could braid and put it up. I should have taken a bed-head photo as I've never seen anything like it before.

As soon as I got off from work, I washed it with orange Palmolive dish soap hoping to reach at least a "sane" state to further diagnose. I haven't clarified my hair since my hair typing photo of 30 April, so it's been quite a while. Now my hair is GREAT today! Thanks Madge!! :p

Note to self: Mostly I've used coconut oil without issue (years) but recently "for convenience" I've started to add avocado oil as it doesn't freeze at ambient temperatures. But unlike coconut oil, which contains mostly saturated fatty acids, avocado oil contains numerous sites of unsaturation in the fatty acid chains. Perhaps these double bonds are reacting to something in my hair? No idea but I think I'll just avoid avocado oil and use the microwave.

[lapushka]

Success!

It took me nearly an hour before leaving for work (didn't help) yesterday morning for me to get my comb through this tangled mess so I could braid and put it up. I should have taken a bed-head photo as I've never seen anything like it before.

As soon as I got off from work, I washed it with orange Palmolive dish soap hoping to reach at least a "sane" state to further diagnose. I haven't clarified my hair since my hair typing photo of 30 April, so it's been quite a while. Now my hair is GREAT today! Thanks Madge!! :p

Note to self: Mostly I've used coconut oil without issue (years) but recently "for convenience" I've started to add avocado oil as it doesn't freeze at ambient temperatures. But unlike coconut oil, which contains mostly saturated fatty acids, avocado oil contains numerous sites of unsaturation in the fatty acid chains. Perhaps these double bonds are reacting to something in my hair? No idea but I think I'll just avoid avocado oil and use the microwave.

In my country Palmolive do quite gentle shampoos. With Olefin 11 blah blah blah, something or the other! :spitting:
But dish soap will work. ;)

[foreveryours]

I used Palmolive for a few years before I came here after "stretching my washes" a ridiculously long time before trying to "take better care of my hair" here :p. This year has been a true comedy of errors. But I'm not too old to learn a new trick or two from my mistakes. The orange antibacterial Palmolive is one of the very few dish soaps which is acidic (pH about 4). Almost all are quite alkaline (pH 9-10) which is very very bad for hair.

[BleachedBerry]

dry hair, small sections, a rattail comb, a wide tooth comb, and lots of patience.