Tucking hard ends

[HotRag]

I have problems with my "hard hair".

Ends will get loose and free from any hairdo.

When I had 50" hair with taper, all tapered ends emidiatelly got loose if braided (bottle brush effect at lower lenght) or when i did attempts to make a bun.

Now I have 27½" hair with no taper, but now I have problems with hard "goat hair brush-effect" with ends.

I oil my hair, and it do god, but doesn't make hair more easy to "bend".

It's like it "wont bend".
This makes another problem also, when having a soft/loose hairdo, the hair "wont bend" at right places and look weird, loose soft braids or hairdos make the hair tend to fall to face instead of a nice bend at where braid or hairdo i starting.

Are there any tips for this kind of hair?
One thing a come to think of, is maybe to spray with water and use aloegel.

(Hum, 5" of hair ends held itself right up when I checked. I am not using cones or anything else, just mild schampoos, conditioners and oil lenghts - and since a couple of weeks CO and oil lenghts.)

[Wavelength]

Check your hair products -- do any of them contain proteins? My hair gets very stiff and crunchy if I overdo it with proteins, especially if I oil it afterward.

Aloe gel would probably help, but make sure it's at least 95% pure. (And not coloured green! It should be clear.) Coconut oil also helped soften my hair a lot. If you aren't using that you might want to look into it.

Another possibility is that your hair has build-up, and you need to clarify. This can happen even when you don't use cones.

Is your hair damaged or split where it's stiff? If that's the case then the splits are tangling themselves up and the hair shaft isn't smooth anymore. In that case all you can do is trim.

[HotRag]

Thank you.
It would be possible that it is caused by proteins.
But, I have had this hair quality for all of my life, and my eldest son has the same, and also my father and my grandmother.
Probably the problem wont get better anyway, by using proteins.

I will also try more of coconut oil, I have almond and sesamy now, but I've read about coconut here.

Is it necessary to use some special schampoo ingredient to get rid of proteins, like SLS?
Is it possible to just change conditioner to protein free, or must I schampoo it first?

[Wavelength]

Is it necessary to use some special schampoo ingredient to get rid of proteins, like SLS?
Is it possible to just change conditioner to protein free, or must I schampoo it first?

No, you don't have to do anything special as far as I know. Just switch to protein-free products and that should do the trick.

Just make sure you can recognize a protein ingredient -- sometimes they're not labeled very helpfully! (For instance, "Hydrolyzed Wheat Extract" and "Silk Amino Acids" are proteins, but neither of them actually say "protein".)

[HotRag]

Ok, thanks very much.
Hope this will do at least some change to my "hard hair".

I read about Camellia oil in another thread in recipy forum part, maybe I'll try that oil.
Until I get that, I'll try coconut oil.
I have shea butter and olive oil at home too, can try them also.

[spidermom]

Your profile picture certainly is pretty.

My ends only get stiff when it's time to clarify, then I give it a good wash from scalp to tips, and it returns to its normal silky-softness. However, my hair is more on the fine side. Yours looks more coarse to me. Only some of my white hairs are coarse, and I imagine that if I had a head full of them, it would feel more hard and stiff. At least hair like that is very resilient; you can probably leave your ends exposed and they wouldn't come to harm. A woman at my bank sometimes makes kind of a spiral-bun (which I can't duplicate to save my life) in the back, then spreads her ends out and sprays them to stay like that. It sort of gives a peacock feather affect -- very striking.

[HotRag]

That profil picture is after my first CO-wash :-)
The avatar is from 2 years before I cut the long hair off, and the thing the pup has in her mouth, is my hair.
(I sure regret cutting the hair back then...)

Just to be sure, exactly what does "clarify" mean?
(Maybe different things due to what the problem are?)

[Ursula]

It sounds to me, not like a hair quality/product issue, but a technique issue. Tucking in blunt ends is a different skill than wrapping in tapered ends.

Having blunt ends, myself, here is what I do. When doing a bun based on a twisted coil, I continue the twist to the very ends of my hair. I then arrange the bun (say, a cinnamon roll) on the back of my head. When I get to the ends, I tuck the ends not just under the neighboring coil section, but in between that coil and the next coil in towards the center of the bun. I will then arrange a stick or hairpin so that I catch the coil that the ends were tucked under, go under and through the coiled part of the ends, and have the pin end up stuck into the next layer of coil.

I also find that a firmly twisted coil holds better than a loose coil, because when I do the pin to hold everything in place, the pin stays secure in all the coiled sections mentioned above.

[HotRag]

Ursula: Thanks for the tip.

The "tucking end" problems I had even when I had tapered ends. For example braids soon looked like a bottle brush and all tries to do stuff like cinnamon bun, resultet in ends spreading.
At the time I thought it would be better if my ends were blunted LOL.
I almost allways had "caterpillar style" like the one in my avatar.

I hope I can change the hardness somewhat by be sure to not use proteinconditioners and find the best oil for my hair.