Hello Everyone! Welcome back, today’s topic is shrinkage.

While I had relaxed hair, I never knew what hair shrinkage was. Due to me faithfully going and getting my relaxers on time throughout the year, I hardly ever seen the natural state of my hair. Every time I would see what you call new growth on my roots, I would just straighten it out. Even in between relaxers, that new growth was straightened with heat as well. It took me a while to get used to seeing my hair in its natural state I guess because I was not used to it and was not comfortable with it.

During the first year of my natural journey, my hair began to shrink, literally. It was growing, but I was not visually seeing it because I have always based my hair growth on how long it was, not on the actual health of it. I did not realize in the beginning that with my natural hair type, my hair grows outward more than anything instead of downward, so just because it looks short a majority of the time, does not mean that it truly is short while straight. With my curl pattern being 4A + 4C, my shrinkage is very extreme. My curls clump together very tightly so it may look as though my hair is is not even long enough to pass my ears, but in reality, my hair is actually shoulder length. Check out my previous post on Learning Your Hair Type if you’re unfamiliar with your hair type. I found that when I began to learn what exactly a hair type is, it made my understanding of hair shrinkage become easier to comprehend. I manage mine better now than I have in the past by using curling creams and gels for styles that I want to have a little bit of length to. One example of this would be my two strand twist outs as shown below.

For tighter curls, I use curling creams right along with my typical hair routine, the LCO Method. An example of this would be my bantu knot outs shown below.

How do you manage your hair shrinkage? Have you found it to be a great thing or a bad experience on your natural hair journey? Leave your responses below in our comment section! Thanks for reading everyone, happy blogging!

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