I've been careful to only use rubber bands on my nurture side, but I figured it was one of the more extreme things I'm doing. I mean, what harm could a rubber band do?
When my friend Tim was thinking about locks, I offered him some of my excess bands for sectioning off the hair. He agreed that having locks of roughly even thickness was what he wanted. (We also spoke about wax, and I'll be coming back to that in a post soon. There are more reasons people choose to use wax than some people recognize.)
So I was surprised when Tim told me he was not using bands, because he'd heard that they "cause clumping." My immediate reaction was to ask, "Isn't that the point?"
I think what Tim had heard is that bands can cause thin spots and break hairs. If they're too tight, yup, they can. It's his choice, but I still think that rubber bands are not likely to be harmful, and the fact that I won't use them on the nature side is mostly me being extra cautious, in case I'm wrong.
My five-year mission: to explore strange new hairstyles, to seek out ways to keep locks neat and clean, to boldly go where no man has gone before with dreadlocks.
The rubber band cautionary tale that made me shudder concerns those left in overlong. The possibility exists that the rubber will go soft and gooey with age, fusing to and melding into the lock, becoming impossible to remove. I've also heard that they can leave thin spots and cause breakage if too tight. With all the lose hair I'm dealing with around my roots these days, however, the possibility of root assistance is looking awfully darned attractive. ;)
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