The hair post.

[halimede]

Hair post, as promised to trickofthedarkFirst up, my number one definition of great hair is healthy hair, be it fine, thick, wavy, curly or straight as a board. Obviously if you like the teased up, heavily hair-sprayed look your mileage may vary, and that's fine. But the silken cascade of flowing tresses thing (think Mary Sue) is what my hair tips and tricks are

Comments

[tavellafic]

Hmm, I do most of this (not cold rinses, though, because I like my showers hot), but I'll definitely have to look into a horn comb.

[halimede]

I'm really happy with my horn comb. If you can't find anything, let me know. In September I'm going to another craft market. If you mark it on your calender and kick me about it around that time I could pick up another affordable one from the slightly damaged pile, and send it to you, if you like.

[flambeau]

I had a lovely wood comb that I got from the Body Shop, but I think invisible lovecraftian monsters must have eaten it. Feel moved to do an oil treatment on my hair now, though. It's gone all dry and frizzy lately and I haven't really adjusted to that, since it never was before. Have seriously considered cutting it short, or at least shorter (one advantage of not having hair long enough to sit on should be that you don't accidentally sit on it and neither does anyone else...), but I think I'd miss it.

Isn't there henna treatment that's more brown than red, or is my mind going?

[halimede]

I bought a wood comb from kostkamm too (I *love* that 'slightly damaged' bargain basket!) but I'm completely swayed by the horn. I'll probably sell or give away the wooden one at some point. It smells nice though. Cedar, I think. :)

Oil is good. And the length sounds very cool indeed. I'd certainly try frizz remedies before chopping it off. Though trimming the ends and/or doing a search-and-destroy on the split ends can sometimes help.

Henna pretty much stays in the orange/auburn/red spectrum, but you can indeed get various colors if you mix other stuff with the henna. There are herbal mixes available in shops here where they add things like walnut husk, indigo, rhubarb root, stuff like that. (Be careful with commercial mixes though, some of them have the icky, damaging toxic stuff mixed in after all, and the bad stuff goes by a gazillion confusing names.)

There are also people experimenting with different mixes on hennaforhair.com. My hair is auburn-but-still-in-the-red-spectrum, not in the browns. Some people report getting

[flambeau]

Maybe I'll look into the senna thing. I'm all for things that are good for my hair, but I don't want my hair to be red. *g*

Also, I meant to say before, wrt shampoo: most commercial stuff is way too strong, for me at least, so I usually dilute it with a bit of water. This has financial side benefits as well. ;)

Been working on searching out split ends over the past few days. Kind of a pain. It's fun to see all the naturaly tapering ends on hairs that have never been cut, though.

[halimede]

Belated comment catch-up rally:

I'm all for things that are good for my hair, but I don't want my hair to be red. *g*

{reads own comment over} I did make it clear that with mixes with other herbs thrown in you can get brown tones, right? It's just plain henna which can't, and there are enough products with henna in the name that don't have henna at all and/or have toxic dyes in them that I always feel I have to be very clear that henna alone is red to auburn only.

Been working on searching out split ends over the past few days. Kind of a pain. It's fun to see all the naturaly tapering ends on hairs that have never been cut, though.

Try these sites for good ways of trimming the split ends more easily:
http://www.xxl-haar.de/english.htm
http://splitends.bebto.com/getridofse.htm

Also, *never* been cut as in absolutely never? Whoa, cool. :)

[stamplet]

Ooh, thank you! My hair's only a bit past my shoulders, but I can definitely use these tips. :-) Do you ever pull your hair back, like in a ponytail? If you do, what do you use - a clip or a scrunchie or something else?

[halimede]

Heh, as I was saying to Interlock, I should probably do a hairtoys post soon. :)

I use wood hair sticks, and I have a horn hair fork (two pronged mega hair pin) and a horn french twist comb. I also have a few metal ficcare type clips, and for ponytails I have two bunjiis. They're great, because once you've got them in (took a couple practice runs the first time) they stay put, you don't have to tighten them again. With regular elastic you keep having to split the tail and yank on it, which draggs the elastic up over the hair against the grain, with these that doesn't happen. I also still have a couple of the really thick elastic bands. I live in an area where there are lots of afro-hair care shops and they have loads of those.

[trickofthedark]

Hey, thanks! This is a whole lot of great infomation which I will now go use! Yay! Thanks again. ;)

[karisu_sama]

Very interesting post; I was routed here via my LJ friend trickofthedark's post. Blame her. ^_