So I decided yesterday that I wanted to try to come up with a new protective style, and I’ve always wanted something else to do with twists besides just twisting them. The above is what I came up with.
I started by co-washing my hair with my V05 Strawberries n Cream Moisturizing Milk and thoroughly detangling with a wide-toothed comb. Then I added some Garnier Fructis Sleek-n-Shine leave-in. After that I banded my hair by twisting the end (not two-strand twist, just twisting around themselves) and then putting on a ponytail holder and following through with other bands using the criss-cross technique seen here in this video. I then sat under a dryer on low for 30 minutes and cool for 30 minutes. After that I took each banded section out and blow-dryed on low for about 15 seconds just to get it dry, then I put Castor Oil on the ends and worked my way up before putting the section into a big twist.
The purpose of the Castor Oil was to soften and moisturize my hair, particularly my ends. I try to pay special attention to my ends to avoid the need for a trim, or at least frequent trimming, which is why I start with any moisturizer at my ends and then work my way up.
After I had my hair twisted up, I took it all out and played with it a bit (hey, I couldn’t help myself!) before parting it into 4 sections to begin the style. Section off a part in the middle and put the two sides into a ponytail or twist or whatever you do to keep it out of the way.
Once you have your hair sectioned off, begin your flat twists. I was going to try to do fancy parting and a cute design, but I’m not that great with the parting yet. Although it WAS much easier with my hair dry and stretched, I’m just not that good with parting. So I did straight parts and twisted straight back. Once I got to the end I finished it as a two strand twist and used a metal duckbill clip (plastic ones just don’t last for me). Do each side, then twist the ends going up and put them into a loose bantu-knot.
Now that you have your sides out of the way, simply do two strand twists at the top, once that finished those, I just took half and curled them under to the left and pinned and did the same thing to the right. You can pin these however you want. Here’s what it looked like when I finished doing all of that:
Check out my puff! Actually, I was tempted to leave my hair like this, and if you want I imagine you can. But I told myself when I started this process that I was trying to come up with a protective style, so I parted the back into sections and did pretty big twists, there are probably only 20 back there:
Again, you can leave your hair like this at that point if you want, but I wanted a protective style. So I experimented and ended up doing a bun last night:
Before I went to bed I rolled my hair on satin rollers and rods to get the twists curly, and because the twists on the left side (where I naturally have a looser texture) didn’t want to stay together. This morning I played around with pinning them using hair pins:
It was actually pretty cute. I wanted to go for a pin-curl look, they don’t look precisely like pin curls, I may try them again. I took this down though because I really didn’t feel like having a bunch of pins in my hair all day. I took that down and just put my hair into the style you see at the top of this post.
That’s all I did, pretty simple style, but I think it’s very cute. It’s going to be cold soon, so I need to come up with different things to do with my hair. One thing about fully stretching my hair out, it was cool to get a better idea of the length. Check my fro:
That is a LOT of hair. LOL
