Nature vs Nurture: Some visual differences emerge

I need to become better at taking pictures of my hair.  Close-up pictures that lets you see exactly what it is that I'm talking about.  But hey, if I can't paint a picture with words then the seas will rise anyway.

People, at least when they're prompted, say that they notice a difference between the sides of my head, and they can identify which side I'm leaving alone and which I'm futzing with.  I couldn't figure out how to embed the online version.

Here's a quick table laying out what I'm doing with each side of my head.

	Nature side	Nurture side
Lemon-saltwater spray	Yes	Yes
Wax	No	Yes
Palmrolling	No	Yes
Crochet hooking	No	Yes
Clockwise rubbing	No	Yes
Lock Pepa	No	Yes
Rubber bands	No	Yes
Split-and-twist	No	No
Dread Shampoo	Yes	Yes
Separating	No	Yes

Some things it's hard to do on just one side, like shampoo and the saltwater spray.  The latter (lemon juice and sea salt in water, spritz after bathing) is a replacement for a product, and the naturalists seem to like it so I'll stick with it.  The shampoo I'm going to use until it runs out, but I have ideas for a more meaningful replacement when that time comes.

I know there's an actual term for the technique I called "split-and-twist," but I forget what it is.  It involves parting the unlocked hair at the base of the lock and feeding the entire lock through the opening.  I'm holding off on doing this to tighten the bases, as I've heard that weakens the locks and I would rather look into that separately.

Speaking of separately, "separating" simply means cutting or breaking strands from one lock which get stuck in another.  I'm curious to see if my nurture locks will start to grow together.

PS - if you desperately need a fix about my dreadlocks and I haven't posted in awhile, check out the Dread Like Me YouTube playlist.  From time to time I'm in a visual mood instead of a writing one.

Waning waxing

So I'm coming to the end of my dread wax supply, and I don't have any plans to buy more.  I think the stuff has been helping, but there's no way to be sure if I keep using it.  As it is, my wax-on-wax-off alternating weeks has been reduced to waxing it every other Friday.  After yesterday's application, the first since my dreadful mess, I only have about half of what it takes to do my whole head, and that seems like the right time to move on.

State of the locks: three months and one week

I've already started using homemade dreadlocks products, starting with a replacement for Locking Accelerator.  What's great about that product is that its makers offer a homemade substitute on their site.  Mine includes a bit of lemon juice, but I used less salt so I'm going to up my ratio a bit next time I make it.

Some products don't seem to have a homemade replacement, like the Lock Peppa.  I just don't have a convenient supply of bentonite around town, and that stuff really works.  I'll probably be buying more of that at some point, but I'm not out of it yet.

The wax is another story.  There's good arguments explaining how it helps by compressing knots once they've been tightened, but when you hear that the wax instead inhibits locking by preventing the scales on the hairs from catching on one another, it also sounds reasonable.  Most of my backcombed locks are tightening nicely, but I have a handful that have resisted, and I've backcombed them again (a couple twice by mistake, I think), with little improvement.  Maybe not using wax will help them, maybe not, but I don't see how it could hurt them any.

Particularly since my dreadlocks survived a chlorine pool.

The experiment continues!

Homemade products

I started locking my hair using a specific system and set of products, but now I think I know enough to start thinking about homemade alternatives.  Here are some of my half-formed ideas about a home locking kit:

• Dread wax - made of beeswax and paraffin with hemp seed oil, vitamin E, and fragrance, this should be replaceable with beeswax alone mixed with a bit of E and some hemp seed oil, if I can find that oil anywhere.  I've only used two-thirds of the three-and-a-half-ounce container in over two months.



Latch hook and crochet hook are good locking tools.

• Locking accelerator - Purified or natural spring water, some lemon juice, and a dash of non-iodized sea salt.
• Lock peppa - not a clue how to replace this stuff at home, and it works well.
• Dread comb - any good metal comb is fine, but the price for this one is comparable, and it has a ruler on it, which is helpful for sectioning.
• Loose hair tool - crochet and latch hooks are perfectly fine to replace any of these specialty tools.
• Shampoo - got to have something residue-free for washing locks.  I have a recipe that uses water, baking soda, and a drop or two of tea tree oil.  I am not sure if the tea tree oil is too much residue or not, but paired with a vinegar rinse I think it should be okay.
• Rubber bands - any small rubber bands, like the ones used on braces, should work; it's just a question of price because they don't last either way.

Low maintenance hair?

Maybe if my commitment had been to leave my hair completely to its own devices for five years and see what happens, I would have ended up with low maintenance hair, kind of like how letting a field return to forestland is low maintenance.

But alas, my commitment is more like training bonsai than letting land lie fallow.  And, like bonsai, it takes as much work as patience.

So how low-maintenance is this mass of hair?

• For starters, I'm using a blow dryer.  I've done that maybe three times in my life up until I started this experiment, but now I use it to melt wax, as well as to dry my hair if I'm going to wear a hat or it's just really humid out.
• Then, there's loose hair management and blunting the tips.  These are both activities that take teamwork to do somewhat easily, and they also both often have to be repeated.
• Yesterday I rebackcombed a couple of stubbornly loose locks.  I wasn't expecting to have to do that again, ever, but for at least one of the two it definitely helped tighten it up.
• Every day I take a few minutes to palmroll, and days without wax I also do some clockwise rubbing to create new knots.

Here's a video about blunting those tips:

I'll talk a bit about specialty products in an upcoming post.

So no, I'm not finding this to be an experiment in low maintenance.  It's actually one of the longest-term, highest-time-investment commitments I've ever made.

Countdown to zero

I've worked out a large-scale plan for these locks of mine, still in their infancy.

Still so young . . . what will five years bring?

• I'm keeping them for five years, barring a serious hygiene crisis.  I think that should be enough time for me to understand the non-spiritual reasons for dreadlocks, as well as the challenges and detriments.
• I won't buy more dread wax after this container is finished.  Sure, it's deductible (when you're a professional writer, stuff you buy to write about is), but it's not intended for permanent use.  Besides, plenty of people vehemently oppose waxing dreads, and I want to see what difference I notice.
• Likewise, I will phase out the rest of my dreadlocks products as they run out.  I haven't seen any occasion to use locking accelerator since day one, so if anyone wants a premixed bottle, 90% full, hit me up.

Having a deadline allows me to decide if I have fallen in love with my locks, or if I want to test the theory that they can be unlocked without just cutting them off.  Honestly, that claim is intriguing to me, so I might have to divest myself just to see how well that works.  Check out my dreadlock countdown clock.

After all, it's just hair, right?

Great balls of dread!

It may not look like much, but this dread ball is huge.

I made my first dread ball today, and I'm stoked.  It may look underwhelming in the picture, but this is a big step towards bringing my locks into line and making them behave like the hairy snakes they are. I know, I got some splainin' to do.

When we sectioned and backcombed my hair, every effort was made to get all the hairs into one lock or another.  But . . .

• . . . my hair is pretty short, so some probably slipped out right away.
• . . . the locks started out quite loose, so a few worked their way out.
• . . . my healthy scalp is pushing out new hairs all the time, and a lot of them just don't know about the new hair plan yet.

So there's a lot of hairs just kinda wandering around out there, not sure what's going on because they don't have any little follicle friends pointing them in the right direction.  It's creating a fuzzy little halo, a corona of wispy fibers shooting out from my head, catching the sun as I go through my day.

The way to give these hairs a home is to make a little dread ball, a tangle that I can slip up inside one of the locks so that it all tightens up together.  This is the how-to I'm using:

Since I've been thinking about backing off wax, I've been feeling around for these hairs when I'm tired of palmrolling.  In the video, Jonny says that locating and separating the loose hairs is the difficult part, but I don't have any trouble on that step.  Maybe it's because my hair's still fairly short.

Where I was stuck was making the dread ball itself.  I wasn't serious enough to get out the Lock Peppa mentioned in the video (it came with the kit I ordered, and there's plenty left), but I was annoyed that I couldn't start to catch the hairs together without the stuff.

Credit the dream-state for my success.  As I awoke slowly, I remembered that you have to bend the hair over as you're rolling it, and I tried doing it that way. Before I was fully awake I had the dread ball you see above.

My wife is confident she can get as much action out of a crochet hook as she can from a proprietary loose hair tool, so we're going to pick one up.  If she wasn't already very good with fiber arts and needlework I'd want to get one of the specialized tools, but I'm confident she won't do more harm than good.

One week in: let's talk about waxing dreads

I can't believe that one week ago today my scalp was in agony as we backcombed the hell out of it.  Where are my locks now?  They're in lots of different places:

One week in, professional and stylin' in one slick package

• some are poofy with a wall of hair around a hollow inside
• others are really narrow, closely-packed little spikes of hair
• a couple of them, shorter ones, are really only sticking together because of the rubber bands

which I would call progress, all in all.  There's a halo of loose hair around every lock, and combined with the sprinklings of salt in my pepper they lack visual definition.  On the other hand, they're staying together better, and when I've worn my hat for awhile they're willing to stay down until I palmroll them.

I've been cautious about overwaxing my dreads, and I realized that what I thought was wax was actually the hair starting to lock up, which is a lot faster than I expected.  (The flipside is that they'll probably take a lot longer to mature than I'm expecting, but we'll see about that.)

Waxing dreadlocks is very controversial, it turns out.  I am waxing my locks, but I don't know enough to say that it's the right thing, or a good thing, or the best thing, or the dread thing.

I just don't have wax on lockdown.

Here's a good example of the argument against using wax:

Man, that screen shot is not flattering, is it?

So wax will cause problems like mildew, wax will slow the locking process, "you won't have dreads, you'll just have candles on your head."  That last one's funny.  But hey, I didn't know there was a controversy, and I'm learning by living.  In fact I bought my wax from one of the companies named in that video, although I found my information about using wax elsewhere.

In truth, DreadHeadHQ recommends a very minimal amount of wax in dreads.  I don't think I would need another container, because I'm supposed to use it less and less frequently.  I'm cautious about not adding wax if there's any left, so worst case scenario I've been sold something I don't need, and something to remove it with.

The opposition seems to like videos:

It's passionate, but is it accurate?  Some people believe that anything other than neglect isn't "natty" enough, but I'm going for a more controlled, cultured look; bonsai instead of banyan tree.

I'm going to follow the regimen I'm on, which calls for wax in the locks for the first month, reducing after that.  I already own the wax, so it won't cost me money.  If wax really slows down locking, well my hair likes to knot anyway, and it's been pretty well backcombed, so it's just going to take longer.  If it works, though, I will have smooth, tight locks in two or three months under the best of circumstances.

Either way, one week in I'm continuing to take a laissez-hair attitude about my dreadlocks.  At least when I'm home and no one can see them.

More maintenance madness

Profile, dreadlocks two days old

I think there's more wax in there than I realized, because my fingers are slightly tacky from palmrolling, so I only rewaxed three or four dreads.  Overwaxing causes problems, so I'm being very cautious.

Palmrolling is tedious and tiring - keeping the arms up in the air gets old before too long.  It's challenging to make sure I get every lock, so I expect some just won't get rolled as much as others.  I have to learn to adopt a bit of a laissez-hair attitude, after all.

I can still detect moisture in some of the fluffier locks around back, so I imagine that in the winter my hair will become a deadly weapon.

I need to get myself some kind of locking tool to address the halo of looseness around each lock, but I'm hoping that a lot of them will find their way back in on their own.  I already found one lock with a loop of hair coming out; this is to be expected, and having a tool around to pull stuff like that back in should make my life easier.

I'm taking a poll about the dreadlock decision:  would you dread your hair?  Click there and answer with care.

One day in . . .

Today I have bits of hair sticking to a light sheen of wax on my fingertips.  It means that every time I touch my nose I tickle it with some tiny hair, or fiber from my hat or sweater.  There is just enough wax on them to make the surface slightly sticky, accumulated from palmrolling my day-old dreadlocks.

Step 1:  section the hair

Yesterday, Earth Day, was a lot longer than I expected it to be, and completely exhausting.  My good wife set to sectioning my hair at about 1 in the afternoon, and we finished the final step of blow-drying the newly-waxed locks after eight.  We did have breaks for meals and such, but all told it was a solid six hours worth of work.

I expected it to take less time because my hair is on the short end of the range, but that actually made it take longer, for two reasons:

1. the learning curve was spread over more locks, and
2. there's a lot less hair to lock, so it takes more backcombing to get it together.

To expand, there's always a few "learning dreads" which aren't as tight as they could be, and have to be rebackcombed.  This is already sounding technical, so here's less than two minutes of video on backcombing to explain it:

The example of the ideal dread is all fine and dandy, but keep in mind that the first inch or more of each lock is not tangled, and won't look like that; my locks are all about three inches long each so that gives you about two inches of learning per lock, and those are tough inches since the poof percentage is elevated by the percentage of root hair.  We were three-quarters through my head when my wife said, "I think I'm starting to understand how this works," meaning that her tactile sensitivity to textiles was kicking in.

Agony above,
serenity below

One thing that was exactly as expected was the pain of having that done to every single square inch of my head.  Oh.  My.  God.  Maybe dreadlocks are like tattoos and childbirth (I've experienced the former and heard about the latter) in that you forget how agonizing the process is after you're through it and recall it through the hazy delirium of endorphins, but I don't think so.

The reason why is that I am going to have regular reminders of how much dreading sucked as they mature.  I get to do the palmrolling, and the clockwise rubbing, and the squeezing them dry when they're wet.  None of these things actually hurts much, but my brutalized scalp reacts to my touch the way Tina would to Ike's, and it all comes back to me again day after day.

Don't dread having a cat in your lap.

My friend Amanda Catherine told me that they'd by "spiky," and she wasn't kidding.  When I first saw what they looked like, before I put in any wax, I thought that they were being supported by rubber bands at the bases, but such was not the case.  Poofy, erect stalks covering my head, bringing forth images of electrocution caused by a game of "Truth or Dare" gone wrong.

The waxing took most of another episode to complete (we watched a couple each of "Buffy," "Xena," and "Jack and Bobby," and one of "Sliders" as well).  After I warmed it and worked it in, Robin took the blow dryer to it so it would melt and really get in there. The heat was enough on my inflamed scalp to make me gnash my teeth and rend my clothing, which is why I'm glad I was wearing a high-quality sweater from L.L. Bean, for it was quite resistant to rending.

I tried only briefly to put my beloved took on over this new head of mine before giving up.  The tam fit, but I put it on and removed it gingerly, since the locks are probably even more fragile that most new locks are.  Today I stabilized my locks more, and to my amazement got the took on over my Styracosaurus self.

The stabilization started with putting rubber bands at the base of each lock, in addition to the ones at the tips. This compresses the base just enough that I can get some results from palmrolling, which is the same motion used to make a snake out of clay.  With the wax in there, palmrolling compresses the lock and helps it stay that way as the locks tighten.  My regimen for the next month is going to be daily palmrolling of each lock, and adding a little bit of wax to the locks that don't have any left in them.  I think I already have a couple like that, but I'm paranoid about overwaxing so I'm going to wait a day.

As the sun sets on my hair's first dreadful day, I have a low-grade headache and feel like I'm wearing a constant state of surprise.  I may venture out this evening and see where my hair takes me.  Perhaps tomorrow I'll talk about the mental toll all that pain takes, unless I decide that I'm whining too much.

Today's the day!

Yep, I have chosen Earth Day as my locks' birthday.  I need to take one more before picture, to capture the moment for all time.

Then I'm going to wash my hair with dread shampoo and figure out how big I want 'em to come out.  This can get complicated, but these tips on sectioning for dreadlocks say I should be aiming for bundles of hair about the diameter of a pencil, which will make slightly thicker locks.  We will figure out how big the sections need to be.  It ranges from about half an inches to two inches for each square, and my hair is thick so I expect that about an inch per square will be about right. I want my locks to be consistent in thickness because it will look nicer and they will mature at the same rate.

Then I will squirt a bit of locking accelerator on them before the backcombing begins.

Crap, I need to figure out what we should watch on TV while we're doing this!

Got my dread kit!

Supa Dupa Dread Kit + Lock Peppa

I got my Supa-Dupa Dread Kit in the mail today (well, yesterday), exactly when it was promised.  Here's what I got in the box, which includes the kit and one add-on product:  dreading comb, dread wax, dread shampoo, lock accelerator, and Lock Peppa.  That last one is the product I added onto the kit.

So far, so good:  I was promised the kit in 5-7 days and got it in 6.  Everything I ordered was in the box.  Nothing was broken, there wasn't any unnecessary packaging, and there was absolutely nothing else in the box - they sent me an email, and I like that they didn't print the invoice out, too.

Dreading comb

The dreading comb is the crux of this entire adventure.  It's the tool that makes this a process of cultivation, rather than simply allowing it to grow wild.  My head's going to be an English garden, not an old-growth forest.

Backcombing can technically be done with any comb, but if it's not metal it's probably not going to hold up without breaking.  I'll be writing a lot more about backcombing, the technique which my team is going to use for the locking.

Dread shampoo

In terms of PR, I think the dread shampoo and its tag line ("dread don't have to be dirty") is top priority.  Not only is it possible to wash dreadlocks, it's a really good idea.  Good washing and drying practice helps the lock tighten up and keeps them healthy.  However, ordinary shampoo will do anything but.

Commercial shampoo has a whole lot of crap in it, crap that doesn't get rinsed out of locks the way it does out of "straight" hair.  (When you're talking dreadlocks, "straight" is hair which isn't locked.)  When I popped the top on this bottle, I didn't smell a blessed thing.

Dread wax

The wax is something that I'll use a lot of early on, and eventually not need at all.  You have to put a whole lot of in the new dreads, but re-waxing doesn't happen until there's none left in a particular lock.

DreadHeadHQ calls its wax Dread Butta.  The stuff is slightly yellowish (can you say "waxy yellow buildup?") and doesn't have any particular odor.  It has about the same consistency as coconut oil does at room temperature.

Locking accelerator is a product that's supposed to help the locks form.  It comes in a powder in this bottle, which has to be filled with water to whip the stuff up.

Not entirely sure what this stuff is supposed to do, but I'm going to make some kind of mass-instruction list about what to use when and how and maybe even why, so I can keep it all straight, which will hopefully keep my hair from staying that way.

I don't think there's much to be said about the elastic bands, although the kit came with 50 more than promised, which is cool.  Overdelivering makes good marketing sense.  The bands are black, which is especially stylish.  They're going to help keep the locks separated as they mature.  Natural dreads merge and separate over time, but I'm not going for that effect right now.