Out and about

Fifteen days in, and I found the perfect storm for bringing my young locks out in public again:

• It was a (mostly) sunny day
• There was a rock festival at the local college
• My hair needed a chance to air dry

I just rewaxed most of my locks last night, so palmrolling them into a spiky mace-head was a snap.  If you're going to rock a hairstyle, then rock it well, I say.

Keep on dreadin' in the free world!

I felt good about going out in public, because I appraised my dreads last night and found them to be coming along nicely.  I removed the rubber band at the base of each one, because they had all rolled up away from the scalp and I wanted to reposition them anyway.  As I said, there wasn't any wax in most of them, so I was able to check out how much locking was going on in there.  Most of them have good, strong dreading going on in the vicinity of the rubber band, so moving it up closer to the scalp should only help things along.

The hair has already opened up conversations I hadn't had before.  I ran into a local elected official, who told me that she'd once had dreads herself, and showed me the one lock she'd made a few days ago around the back of her head.  (This isn't the first time I've seen a woman sporting a lock or three back there - I think it's some kind of dread mullet, professional in front, party in the back.)  She's got some amount of skill at backcombing, because the one lock was pretty solid.

She was impressed that I've only had them for fifteen days.  We talked about backcombing (she complimented my wife), about wax (she uses it sometimes, mostly for smoothing when she's dressing up, and didn't know that there's a wax controversy), we talked about clockwise rubbing, and she showed me a dread ball that she'd made.  

Some of those concepts - clockwise rubbing and dread balls in particular - I haven't talked much about because they work best when there's little or no wax in there.

• Clockwise rubbing is used to train new hairs to join the existing locks.  Hair follicles have a cycle of growth, followed by dormancy, after which they push out the old hair and start growing a new one.  The clockwise rubbing at the base of the lock catches these new hairs up in the lock.
• Dread balls are used to capture the loose, flyaway hairs (of which I have many) and grow them into a dread.  The idea is to take a few loose hairs that are nearest to one particular lock, and roll the tips together until they form a tangled knot.  That knot, the dread ball, gets crocheted into the lock.

Based on her assessment, I am considering moving on from the "always have wax in your locks" phase to the "every other week" phase.  That calls for alternating a week of dread balls and clockwise rubbing to form knots with a week of waxing to hold them together as they lock.  I'll reassess next time I wash my hair.