i never realized there was a hair thread!
our hair is pretty cursed, it can look great and i get a lot of compliments when it’s at its best, but… most of the times it is not at its best 
it’s brown, very curly but not binding, and extremely fine - i’ve had it described as “baby hair thickness”
this means that it aggregates into locks that curl in a spiral tube shape that’s super pretty, but it also means that it’s extremely fragile
pretty much any friction will roughen up the strands and break them. i have been to a hairdresser maybe 3 times in the last 10 years, in each visit just cut off the very tips, and still, my hair is shoulder length, and if the curls are stretched or wet, they go down to the height of the breasts at most. the tips just don’t survive long enough to grow longer
and… this is a big improvement from before, it used to break even faster until i learned a number of things that work and don’t work with my hair
another interesting thing is that, much like old telephone cords, the spiral just spontaneously switches chirality in the middle of the lock? i have no idea why it does this, but i think it’s related to how the locks form as they dry, with the segment close to the root developing in one direction, while the tips start developing in the other direction, so they end up meeting midway? no idea if that’s the actual reason though
speaking of which, because it needs well-defined locks to look good, and it needs water to form those locks in the first place, that means that 1) i need to brush it while wet every morning, and 2) once it’s dry, if something messes it up, it will stay messed up until i can wet it and brush it again, which is usually very impractical
this means no hats, no ties, definitely no elastics and even scrunchies actually damage it because it is so fragile, but also: headpats and scritches do mess it up. i love them a bit too much to refuse those, but one way to avoid messing up a curly hair haver’s hair shape is to do behind-the-ear scritches from below the hair, instead of patting or scratching through it!
i also use satin/silky pillow cases, and when i’m in VR i wear a satin/silk hair protector to minimize the damage from friction with the headset, but it still damages it quite a bit
now, i mentioned my hair improved a lot recently, and this has to do with some things i learned about hair structure and what’s in hair products
first is how hair reacts to water and oil
the outer layer of the hair is built from microscopic scales of keratin, shaped in a way where, in the presence of oil they close and hold on to that oil to some pretty extreme levels, and if the scales are closed, they also have a much more resilient structure than their natural state with the scales open
so natural hair that’s sturdy is natural hair aggregated with oil. normally our body produces that oil over several days, but since that also accumulates dirt, we’ve grown accustomed to wash it regularly with soap, and this creates a number of issues:
first, most of our shampoos use some pretty aggressive soaps with incredibly high affinity for both oil and water, so when our hair is exposed to those, they rip the scales open as they bind to the oil, which damages the hair. for this reason you’ll see that a lot of shampoos for curly hair use milder soaps, since curly hair also tends to be more fragile in general due to its oval cross-section creating weaker points along the thinner edges
also, curly hair, well, curls, this means that the oil produced in our scalp doesn’t have the easiest time spreading through the strands, since it needs to climb against gravity
the solution is to add oil back, and this is the purpose of a conditioner! (well, originally it was, at least)
so that’s why you don’t want to shampoo after the conditioner, the shampoo takes oils thar may have gotten dirty away, the conditioner adds clean ones back
as you can imagine, our hair being very fragile, i cannot touch it while it is un-oiled, or i will shred it. instead i carefully untangle it before using soap, then i apply soap to it and don’t friction it, rinse thoroughly, add oil back, and only then it’s safe to brush it again
however this is not the entire story, because more recently conditioners have been including more and more another ingredient, and by now if the product you’re getting isn’t specialized, it will contain those, and even when it is specialized it still sometimes has those. they are the bane of anyone with even mild curls: waxes/paraffins
if you’ve ever had the misfortune of having to clean up wax from somewhere you probably know that often nothing works well: they’re longer chain molecules, and they aren’t as easy to stick to oil nor water, nor soap. they tend to solidify and the only way to get them moving again is some strong chemistry or heat to melt them out
the draw of using waxes/paraffins in conditioners is that they coat the hair in a solid, impermeable layer for both water and oil, that smells good, and thus it makes your hair look great right after you started using the product - waxes, it turns out, bind to hair really strongly
only a couple problems though: with time that layer will flake irregularly, it will also prevent your hair from getting its oil content replenished when it diffuses out, and your common soaps and shampoos can’t take the coat off. and worse, if you keep using it every day, it builds up - irregularly
at first application the hair looks silky smooth, retakes its shape if messed with, and is shiny. with time, especially with curly hair, it starts becoming brittle, deformed, dry, and its smoothness and gloss go away as well, and there’s not much you can do to refresh it, since just building nore layers doesn’t help with the irregularities
at this point the only option is to use a “clarifying shampoo” i.e., a shampoo so strong it can actually break off these accumulating compounds. but this will damage your hair… and in cases like ours, it will break or even dissolve it
the way we avoid this is… we just don’t use a conditioner, we use oil directly
this can be literally something like food-grade palm tree oil, which works well in the summer where it’s hot enough for it to be liquid – seriously, check out the ingredients in the curly hair section, the “coconut oil” is literally just food-grade palm oil with nothing else added (except a little bit more pricey because hey! this is a cosmetic, not food!)
pure jojoba oil also works very well, but what i use almost every day is a product that combines argan oil, glycerin, and some other surfactants and long-chain alcohols that help with making sure the oil is spread think to every strand
it’s a bit harder to apply since you can just make a lather like you do with a conditioner, you have to manually, with your fingers, spread a small quantity of it on towel-dry hair, and then i like to spread what remained on my fingers on a fine comb, that then ensures every strand has its share
of course, you also don’t need to use soap on your hair every day, and you don’t need to add oil to it every day either! i at most add a very tiny bit to the tips only, so that they don’t dry up as quickly. these days i use soap on my hair about once every three days, with adding that extra oil to the tips the day before for extra resistance from the soap
and this is it, the biggest secret to making my hair look good and not break all the time was ditching everything with paraffins/waxes, and switching to oils instead. it took a while initially until all my paraffin-coates hair naturally broke off, but it is considerably softer, more glossy, better defined, still fragile but consistently much less so… everything is much better and i’m finally happy in general with my hair
if you look at those guides on youtube and whanot… it really feels like something incredibly dystopian, people using a ton of products every day because they need to maintain that coat of paraffin up, and then the hair looks good? but in a very expensive and unnatural way, where you have to sculpt it, and then when it dries it bounces back to the exact shape you put it on originally, because it is coated in a thick, almost rigid layer of wax. and using clarifying shampoos regularly because of the aforementioned problems
anw this is already a lot ^^
boop o/
