Protective Styling For Your Natural Hair

Protective styles for natural hair is very important, it is the one way to help retain length on our natural hair. A true protective hairstyle is at its base simply a style that protects the ends of your hair, helping to decrease tangling, shedding and breakage. It gives our hair a break from manipulations and weather conditions. As part of our natural hair journey we should remember to keep our natural hair in protective styles allowing our hair to breathe.

It is advisable to keep long term protective styles (braids, faux locs) for a period of a month or at least 6 weeks and short term protective styles (corn rows, twist outs, buns, crochet styles) for 5 days to a week or even two weeks.

While your hair is in a protective style, remember to always keep it moisturized. Use a moisturizer or apply a leave in conditioner. Water is also another easy way for keeping your protective style well moisturized. By adding some essential oils to the water spritzer jojoba oil or even MPL oil works like a charm. Don’t forget to massage your scalp with some coconut oil while your hair is in a protective style.

Leave some days to weeks between different long term protective styles allowing your scalp to rest.

When you wear your ends tucked away, your hair is in a protective style. This is important because your ends are the oldest and most fragile part of the strand. Frequent and regular washing, conditioning, styling, and detangling requires constant tugging on your hair, making it weaker than the last time.

Having natural hair is exciting and full of endless possibilities! You can literally have a new style everyday you want. How you take care of your hair is extremely important.

The best protective styling anyone can ever have is box braids. They are easy to style, tension free and last longer than any other protective style. I have an IGTV video on easy ways to style your box braids

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A post shared by RAKI | South African Blogger (@theeraki) on Oct 1, 2019 at 11:54am PDT

What is your go to protective style?

Mine is definitely box braids.