Pictures 1 year later

Here are some recent pics of my dreads.  1 year 1 month old.

Shampoos & Products Reviews

I've tried out lots of many shampoos.  Make sure they are residue free and do not have any conditioners in them.  Look for things without elastins, keratins, lanolins, petrolatums, silicones, PEG's or PPG's.

This is the first one I tried as it came with my kit.  I actually really like this shampoo.  It lathers well and leaves hair feeling good.  No smell though and I love good smells.  $16

This one I bought at whole foods  for about $15.  I'm still testing it and haven't made up my mind all the way.  It smells amazing and the ingredients seem very natural and good for your hair.  It lathers great and feels good... just not sure if it will cause any build up.

 

This is another good one.  Around $10 and lathers nice.  I used it once a month or so and feel it really cleans well.

 This one I found on a website and think it is someone that home makes the shampoo.  It is called My Tangled Knots.  It is a foam shampoo which I though was cool.  It smelled great for about a month and then seemed like the ingredients went a little rancid.  Dried my hair out a little but the foam was fun. Around $15

Dr. Bronners is mentioned a lot in dread sites.  It is cheap $5 for this concentrated bottle and you only need about 2 T per full cup of water.  I always by peppermint, smells and tingles amazing!!  I love the feel.  Doesn't feel quite as good after as some of the others and is pain to dilute but for the price and smell it leaves your dreads I like it.  I've tried the bar foam as well and it works good just a pain.

After about 6-8 months I felt like my hair was really dry and researched a bit on what to put on them.  I bought this at CVS for about $5 and I really like the smell and feel of it.  It is just olive oil and Tea tree which helps the scalp too.  I use it about once a month.

The first few months…and maintenance.

The first month is tough… hang in there.  There is an awesomeness to waking up and seeing your hair in dreads, but your hair will do all kinds of crazy things..

Here are some things to expect that are perfectly normal:

1. Your head will itch…like crazy.
I felt embarrassed itching so much, but not much you can do while your head adjusts to infrequent washings and having knotted hair.

2. Most likely you will get dandruff.

The scalp gets flaky when it stops getting conditioned.  I generally wash my dreads about every 4 days and I use a anti-dandruff product just on my scalp almost ever time.
Some great ones are Neutrogena T/Gel or T/Sal.  I use this pretty much everytime I was just on my scalp.

3. Sleeping will be uncomfortable as you get used to laying on dreads.
I promise this goes away quick and becomes normal in no time.

4. There will be lots of loose hair, loops and bumps that form.
Completely normal, don't stress about it and let them be.  I was obsessed in the beginning and was constantly trying to pull in the loose hairs and get rid of the loops.  The loops mean your hair is dreading so celebrate them!!


Okay so now that the bad is out of the way.  Here are some good things to look forward to:

1. You can get out of bed and your hair looks awesome.
2. Someone will tell you almost daily how cool your hair is..
3. You can do a ton of great hairstyles with no hair ties, just twist and knot.
4. Dreads make you more approachable.  Maybe because most people that have them are chill and friendly people.. who knows.  I just know more people want to talk to me now :)

In the beginning I was constantly rolling and trying to get hairs where they belong.  I find that you can do it all you want but it really doesn't matter.  Your hair will do what it wants...  I have some dreads trying to split down the middle and know matter how hard I tried to keep them together nothing worked.  Now I pretty much have stopped messing with them and just let them be.

Creating the Dreads…

Creating the dread (first method):

1. Unravel a section of braided hair (the braid actually helps and provides texture, especially if you have  really straight hair to begin with)
2. Use a metal or sturdy plastic small toothed comb and start at the base teasing the hair.  You want to really create a nice teased, almost ball at the base before you start ratting the rest.
3. Once you have a nice matted up section, use the crochet hook (any small size one will do)
and gently move it in and out of the dread pulling in any loose hairs.

4.  Continue to tease (backcomb) hair and crochet until your dread is formed.
5.  You can use palm rolling (rolling the hair back and forth in the palm of your hands) to mold it into shape.
6.  When you get towards the bottom, if you want a blunted tip pull the crochet hook upwards into the dread.

Here is Dread #1

Although this dread is awesome and one of my favorites now, I freaked out a little with the length that I lost.  More than 1/2 of my hair length was gone and I had some shorter layers in my hair that I worried would end up sticking up.  Granted it was my first one and my husband spent almost 45 minutes making it perfect.  I decided to sleep on it and see how I felt in the morning.

The next day I did some more research and found a few videos on the twist and pull method that seems to keep more length.  Similar method, but instead of backcombing the entire strand up you:

1. Backcomb just the section at the base of your head.

2. Split the strand in 2 and cross it over one another.

3. Then pull the hair all the way up to tighten.

4. You can back comb a little to tighten it further, but this allows for much less length loss.

5. Use the crochet hook to get any lose or stray hairs .

Here is my hair about 1/2 way through the process

Each dread was taking us about 30 min to complete.  I tried working on some of the front ones, while he did the back ones.  Overall took about a week because our fingers (and my head) was pretty sore.

Almost complete

I wasn't sure about leaving out my bangs or not… I saw many cute pictures of girls who had left theirs out so I thought I would leave the front bang un-dreaded and see what I though.  

After about 2 weeks I realized that with my oily hair I was having to wash my bangs every other day or so, but I didn't want to wash my whole head that often and it was just a pain so I went ahead and dreaded the front as well.

Here is an after pic (dreads only a few days old).  They turned out better than I was expecting.

Added in a few beads…

Starting dreads on straight hair… Prep to Dread #1

I decided in March 2013 to take the leap and dread my hair…
I love the look, feel and message dreads evoke.  Don't be afraid and just go for it!  You will have ups and downs throughout the process, but don't give up.  You will get to a place where you love your dreads.

Here is my hair before starting.

Prior to this picture I stopped conditioning my hair for about 1 week.  Once you have dreads you don't want to use any type of products that have conditioners.

Do your research!  I spent hours and hours reading all about dreads, the process, best techniques etc.  Probably watched just about every you tube video out there on dreads.  This really gave me an idea of how I wanted to create them.  The downside is that there is a lot of conflicting information out there.  Do this, don't do this about the same thing.  I did come to the conclusion that I did NOT want to use wax to create my dreads.

I went ahead and ordered a dread kit off of dreadheadhq.com It was $37 and looks like this:

Next we (actually my husband) sectioned out my hair and braided it into small braids.
We knew we wouldn't be able to finish all of my hair in one day so having braids would be a way to keep the hair sectioned until ready to make another dread.

It is important to section your hair first so that you know how the dreads will lay and how it will end up once you get to the front sections.

I'm very glad I did this, since I was unhappy with a few in the front and had to resection.

Here is a shot of the first few braided sections.

Note the brick layer type pattern.  You don't want giant sectioned stripes down your head so it is important to alternate the hair lines. 

You will see in the picture below that we choose to do some "unsquared" type patterns on some of the sections.  After viewing other before and after pics online I was worried about having tons of white lines that looked like checkers on my head and this helped with it. 

One tip I will say is that a few of my sections were done with a longer, rectangle type section and those didn't work out as well months into my dreads.  The hair naturally wants to split in the middle, so if I had a redo I would stick with these uneven star shaped sections.

I was getting pretty anxious to try a dread so we undid one braid and dreaded it.  (Prior we found a mannequin head at Goodwill and practiced)