Curly hair - wet or dry detangle? Boar bristle brushing? Breakage management?

[Shepherdess]

1.) Dry detangling -- she recommends dry finger detangling hair rather than detangling under running water with conditioner, which is the most often recommended way to detangle curly hair. In her thinking, the hair is weaker when it is wet, it probably IS breaking, we just can't tell because we can't feel it due to how soft and weak the hair is when it's wet, and all the broken pieces are getting washed away before we can see them. She recommends dry finger detangling with oil instead. We will feel every snap crackle and pop of the hair if we break it, but the breakage will ultimately be less. This feels so counter to everything I've ever learned, but she stands by it as something that helped her achieve massive length, when before she was stuck at shoulder length when doing more curly-girl-method type detangling. It's hard for me to psychologically get past the sensation of snapping a hair when I'm dry detangling, and I do see little broken pieces (even just running my hands over my hair with a little oil I end up seeing a few little broken pieces fall down into the sink, which I hate) but at the same time, if wet detangling is going to ultimately slow my progress toward super long hair I want to know now.

I also have 3a hair with some 3b curls, but mostly 3a, but starting to see more 2b postpartum, my texture might be slowly changing, or perhaps it is the length. I know that normally for very curly types it is recommended to detangle in the shower. I think in theory, curly hair is more brittle when dry due to lack of moister and the curl points, when it is wet and the curls stretched it doesn't catch as hard I think. For myself I rarely detangle when wet, even though I know it might be better to do so. My reason mostly is due to the fact that I stretch my washes a long time, and I get matting around my braid sometimes with my finer strands. It is almost impossible (for me) to get matts out of hair when wet, so I have to do it dry. I also think this really relates to if you let your hair curl to its natural texture. I think it is definitely easier and safer to detangle curls when wet, because they lump together. Detangling dry curls can result in a frizzy nightmare for me with all my hair, static, and tangling around everything, perhaps not so much with finger detangling but that can take forever for me!! So I don't often let it curl and mostly keep it in braids and I detangle it dry from the braid waves with my tangle teezer. My ends reach my upper calves, so I guess I have what would be considered long curly hair, I have no idea if it relates to how I detangle or not though. I definitely have some damage, but I am trying to get back into babying my hair again.

2.) Boar Bristle Brushing -- This is something she stands by for hair health, for being able to prolong washes, for cleansing the hair and moving sebum down the hair shaft and conditioning ends. Does anyone with curly hair do this? Does it help anyone? Do you experience breakage? I feel like I saw an increase in little broken pieces the few times I've tried it, but I'm drawn to it as a concept. I once saw someone with 4C hair on youtube using a very soft goat hair brush (made for babies) on her hair because she felt that boar bristles did mechanical damage. Wondering if anyone here has tried that as an option, or if brushing for hair health is just something we do not do.

For what it's worth, I don't really care about having defined curls. What I'm interested in is length retention, hair health, and what makes the most sense as a way to grow VERY long hair.

I tried using a boar bristle brush when I first joined the long hair community and I do think it caused some damage for me at the time. I tried one again recently out of curiosity and it doesn't seem to work as well as a fine tooth wood comb for me in spreading oils; the main reason is that even with braid waves my hair is very volumous so it doesn't really reach in the depth that I need. In the past I also owned a goat hair bristle brush and it definitely is far softer! I really loved it at the time, but it didn't do as well with spreading the oils because it was so soft. So I continue going back to my fine tooth wood comb for spreading the natural oils and cleaning out all the lint that accumulates. However, I only use the fine tooth comb once my braid waves have already been detangled, but a wide tooth comb would also work for spreading oils. If hair is already in curls fingers might be better for spreading the oils.

And that is also my reasoning, I would rather have length than defined curls, so my focus has been preserving the length as best possible. I find that braids have helped me immensely with this. I mostly keep my braids up in a bun. I find more success with detangling if I do more than one braid. If I braid 3 braids and braid those braids together it doesn't matt up as much around the nape of my neck as one braid might do. I also lather aloe vera gel and leave in cream on my braids so they don't shred too much. Braid shred = tanges and tangles cause matts for me. If your hair isn't long enough for braids, I think soft silky scarves and hats with silky linings on the inside can definitely help with protecting it. I oftentimes wear hats as an extra protective measure.