Hey all,
I started growing my hair out for dreads 14 months ago. Today I have 8-9in of hair all around. I started doing some research and realized there was alot involved with sectioning and dreading hair that I just wanted to pay someone to do them for me. I ended up finding a guy who does hair professionally and had previously done Asian and Caucasian dreads and had a good knowledge of how to do them. So I stopped worry about researching on how to do them yourself and decided to have this stylist do them. Well...bad idea. The whole situation really sucked to be honest. I couldn't see really what he was doing because the mirror was small and most of the time I was facing away from it. I told the guy I wanted 34-40 dreadies. I ended up with 52 horribly backcombed sticky gooey dreads. In just a few hours some of them were completely flat, and falling apart. I wasn't very happy with the job but figured I just needed to keep palm rolling.
After about 3 days I was tired of palm rolling my hands and getting my hands all sticky from what ever was put in my hair. I was told it wasnt wax but that it was a mud. It was brown and I couldn't read the label, so not really sure if thats even true. The palm rolling was not helping at all, they would would just fall right apart a few minutes after. I started doing more research, and then found a really informative page ( http://www.ragingrootsstudio.com/sectioning.htm ) about sectioning and read here that the grid pattern has the worst coverage of the scalp. This pretty much made me want to take them out. It took nothing to comb them out while washing them, didn't lose any large amounts of hairs, there weren't really any tight knots, it all came right out. After the wash I had a female friend section my hair, and backcomb them into dreads. We had alot of trouble backcoming because there was still some type of residue in my hair still. We went ahead and finshed them. In a day they were falling apart in the middle and on the ends. We couldn't really get any knots started close to the roots either because of the greasy garbage in my hair by the roots, Needless to say, I washed them out, and had to wash my hair about 8 times with dawn dish soap and soaked my hair in apple cider vinegar for an 40min. I then washed my hair twice with mane and tail to try and get all the dawn residue and conditioner feeling my hair had. Today my hair down to my shoulders and wax free.
So I've done my research, I want to aim for the 30-40 range (my second attempt I had 27!) and do the RnT method with alot of change ups to avoid to much braided look. I had a few questions when going this route. I understand that palm rolling is kinda optional and hair will lock on its own, but maintenance wise with new RnT dreads.
How long should I wait before my first wash?
How long till I should be regularly washing them 2-3 times a week?
Is it okay to put my dreads in a pony tail while im at work with my new RnT dreads?
What can I do to prepare my hair for dreads?
How can you get conditioner out of your hair? (the dawn soap left my hair silky smooth, its normally dry and poofy)
updated by @lexxerd: 02/14/15 05:11:59PM
