Reason # 18: Low maintenance

YouTuber rockemknotty responds to my question,"What's your reason for dreadlocks?"



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Reason #17: no other choice

AnnMarie doesn't have dreadlocks anymore, but if you want to check 'em out, they're the ones that I used to create the header image for this blog.

They were this big!

"I didn't really have a choice," she told me.  Her reason for dreadlocks is that somebody started giving them to her and she just decided to go with it.

"The first one was really, really big," AnnMarie recalled.  In the picture here she's demonstrating where a helpful person with busy fingers got the process started, and with how much hair.  It was a big enough chunk that she thought it would be easier to let 'em lock than to try to take it out, which she figured would involve lots of hair loss.

It was at a Rainbow Gathering that she went ahead with it.  "I decided to try to do one lock a day," she said, but "there was a lot of hair," so she and her friends had a lot more work to do than could have been finished on that schedule.

Five years later AnnMarie lost her locks, and this past summer she loaned those locks to me for my blog.  Check out her first attempt at making them into a hat in this dreadlocks vlog -- she's since successfully turned them into a cool knit hat!

Reason #16: spirit

Jason dreamed of dreadlocks from a young age.  "I always pictured myself with dreadlocks," he said.  "When I was a kid I used to draw myself with dreadlocks in a bandanna."  

Drawing in positive energy through dreadlocks.

He doesn't say that those childhood drawings were his reason for dreadlocks, though.  I think that his reason for dreadlocks was also the reason that Jason drew himself with them when he was a youngster.  I'm calling his reason "spirit," because he talked a lot about the spiritual energy associated with dreadlocks.  Here's what he told me he believes:

• Jamaicans people wear locks because it makes it easier for God to reach down and pick them up to bring them into Heaven.
• They are the mark of the snakes around Shiva's neck, and represent fearlessness.
• They are antennas which draw in positive energy from the universe.

And yeah, he's wearing the bandanna, too.

It didn't occur to me to ask Jason about his method, which I think is kinda interesting too, but if I get that info from him down the road I'll come along and post it up and link to it from here.

Be sure to let me know your reason for dreadlocks if you want to be featured here!

End of the line, DreadHeadHQ Dread Shampoo!

I've been waiting for this day for months:  I have finally run out of dreadlock shampoo. How cool is that?

Shampoo is the one thing that I can't really use on just half my head.  That means that if this proprietary product is having a deleterious effect, I won't notice a difference from one side to the other.  No good!

Now I've read (sadly I can't find where at the moment) that the dreadlock wax business depends upon products that remove wax in order to survive.  If that's true, then I should think that my nurtured locks will be impacted.  There should be more hardening of those locks, and I should be able to detect surface wax for longer periods of time.

I'm now using a natural shampoo recipe which was my staple before I started this madcap adventure, and which I understand is a pretty common one for dreadlock care.  However, according to this article on waxing dreadlocks, a baking soda and vinegar regimen can also be used to remove wax, so it's possible that I won't see the buildup I'm expecting.  But maybe this combo will work better at wax removal than the shampoo.  Not sure how I would demonstrate that, but feedback is welcome!

Reason #15: chef hats

Josh used to have the most perfect afro that I have ever set eyes upon.  It was carefully sculpted into a gentle, bulging ellipsoid.  Other than when I used to watch Mod Squad episodes as a kid, I have never had any exposure to a badass afro like Josh's.

"I wanted to wear a chef's hat." --Josh

There was a lot of pushback from his friends when he finally went ahead and got his fro locked.  Facebook was abuzz with reactions of shock and horror.  I had one person tell me, "When he turns his head quickly, I can still see the afro."

So what's Josh's reason for dreadlocks?

"I wanted to be able to wear a chef's hat," he said.  He's studying in a culinary program, and as awesome as his afro was, there is not a toque made that he could put on top without it looking ridiculous. I can't imagine how it would even work, personally: would he shove his afro up the tube, or embed that hat a few inches deep in the hair, or bobby-pin it to death on top? And how much taller than a normal human would that make him, anyway?

And it turns out that maintaining a picture-perfect afro ain't easy -- Josh was spending way more time on his hair that he wanted to be.  He described the process to me, but I'm afraid my eyes just glazed over and I was unable to grasp all the hoops he jumped through daily to make that hair of his seem like it never changed.  I was even recording the conversation, but my phone mysteriously stopped recording before we got to that part.

Eerie.

As for method, Josh got his hair braided and he is planning on just leaving it like that.

Reason #14: art

Tori, hard at work labeling labels. 

Tori wanted dreadlocks from the time she was six years old.  "I was fighting my hair," she told me.  "It was a constant battle of brushing out the tangles."  When she discovered that there was such a thing as dreadlocks, she was enamored.

It was a long time before her dream came true, though.  "I wanted to be in a stable place in my life," she said.  She had her young daughter to think of.  That didn't happen until she secured a job working for a local town, first in the assessor's office and then at the recycling center, where she has taken piles and piles of what seemed to be random crap and organized it into a veritable marketplace of reused materials.

But that's a story for another blog.

The story for this blog is her reason for dreadlocks.

Some of Tori's artsy beads.

"I did it for art," she explained to me.  Sure, not having to comb her hair mattered to Tori, but what really captured her imagination was the artful and pretty things one could do with locks.

Things like putting in decorative beads and bows and strings and things.  Like braiding and tying and dyeing.  Wrapping with wire and doing what inspires.

Tori is fascinated by my nature-vs-nurture dreadlock test, but as a friend and disciple of Soaring Eagle, she is pretty sure she knows how it's going to turn out.  She rattled off a list of ways that wax can ruin locks, and reminded me of how she had wax coming out of hers for over two years after she stopped using the stuff, a tale that I've already recounted here.

Yes, it's crossed my mind to put stuff in my own locks, but no, I am not quite ready to do that.  I don't want beads unnecessarily influencing the development of my locks during this period of testing.  But yes, some of those beads are really pretty!