How do you care for your above shoulder length hair?

[Ophidian]

I'm around lip/chin with a lot of layers from growing out a pixie. Conventional wisdom seems to be that conditioner is only really necessary on lengths, but I seem to have a lot of poof and everything further than 2 inches from my scalp seems to feel dry with shampoo only (I do use some coconut oil, sometimes mixed with shampoo, sometimes pre-poo, and I also do a final rinse with herbal tea and honey which seems to help with moisture). I am trying to grow with no trims so I am invested in keeping my ends as healthy as possible, but am concerned about over-moisturizing or just generally getting carried away with unnecessary experimenting

So for any current or once-upon-a-time shorties, how do you care for your hair? I know that results for anything vary from one head to the next, but I'm curious what has kept your ends happy as you grew out (especially interested in hearing from those who grew out/are growing out with no !).

Shampoo only? S&C? COwash? Something entirely different?

[neko_kawaii]

When my hair was that length I had never heard of applying condish on the length only, so I applied it to all of my hair. *shrug*

My son has shoulder length hair and hates the smell of both shampoo and conditioner (and generally refuses to let me put anything in it) so he is pretty much water only. Not a great combination with his wavy hair that, like mine, tangles if you look at it and forms mats over night. His ends are starting to feel very rough to me, which can't be helping with the tangling situation.

My take on the situation is that something is needed to add slip at shoulder length.

[Nesoi]

I conditioned right from buzz length! I only stopped conditioning the roots once I hit shoulder. I found shorter hair suffered a lot more manipulation and day to day me messing with it than it did once I could properly put it up, so for me conditioner was important I also used a little aloe gel to help with poof before my hair had enough weight to pull it down a little!

[Upside Down]

I conditioned from the roots. I didn't rub it into my scalp

Twists are nice to keep it kind of contained. Edwardian twists or something similar... And finishing with bobby pins.

[Ophidian]

This is very helpful, thank you all for responding! It's also very inspiring hearing people with gorgeous long hair talk about what they did when they had a buzz cut

[Arctic]

I have always used conditioner, even on pixie length.

I'm also a trimmer, always have been, but in general my hair doesn't take any real efforts at that length. Wash, condition, comb when wet, let air dry, style, repeat.

[Nique1202]

After reading this and thinking back to when I had a pixie, I have to admit that "don't condition above the shoulders" does a great disservice to shoulder-length and shorter haired folks. Really, we should be saying "focus your conditioner on the ends where it's needed, not at the roots where there's a better supply of the scalp-made stuff." It's easy for us to oversimplify that and we really shouldn't.

This goes double for those of us who can stretch washes further when our hair passes a certain length. When you wash your hair more often the sebum doesn't have the chance to move further down the hair shaft, so while now I might end up looking greasy right down to my earlobes since I'm going 4 days on average between washes, I have picture proof that I only looked greasy not even to the tops of my ears at shoulder length when I wasn't comfortable going more than 1 day without washing, and thus definitely needed conditioner on my ends at that point.

[Ophidian]

Nique1202 (aka Urban Myth Buster)

That makes sense to me. I do find that I am less able to stretch washes lately, both because my scalp has been acting up if I go more than 3-4 days, and also because it's not long enough for me to just put it up and deal with it for another day or so when it starts to look stringy. Like Nesoi said, I almost feel like I need it more sometimes than when it's longer to weight it down a bit and because I can't really do any protective styles that will hold yet. But I've just been using coconut oil and some honey in my final rinse lately because I was concerned about over conditioning if it didn't need it.

This conversation is starting to remind me of the thread that was going a few weeks ago about sleeping on wet hair. OP asked why we don't/aren't supposed to do it and about half of all responders said they did anyway, "conventional wisdom" or no. I guess do it if it works, don't if it doesn't huh ?

[lapushka]

Because I have oily hair, I never conditioned until I reached about APL length, and then only from ear down.

[meteor]

I agree with Nique1202's points.

I also wanted to mention another aspect of conditioning and why it may be sometimes useful applied pretty high up on shorter hair: styling. Basically, the same head of hair can look very different (hair lays differently) depending on length alone when it's short vs. long, layers vs. blunt cuts. On shorter hair, you may want to sometimes weigh down on the ends to make it easier to style and shape (depending on the look you are going for), whereas when hair is long and heavy, it's pulled downward by the weight alone. The same principle applies to overnight pillow "setting", i.e. bedhead effect (it's much less pronounced the heavier and longer the hair gets, but can sometimes be a challenge for shorter hair). For smoothing down, conditioning can be a good trick. To give a personal example, the longer my hair grows, the further down I apply conditioner (nowadays, only from mid-back down) and primarily for moisture and slip, not styling, but when it was shorter than mid-back, my hair could be seriously hard to control and poofy and conditioning it heavily from roots down really helped me control and style it.
I think some curlier textures can also do pretty well with thorough conditioning throughout the length (e.g. for clumping, curl definition, or methods like the Tightly Curly method by Teri LaFlesh) vs. conditioning ends only.