Congrats, but they definitely look crocheted. I hope you stopped. Even 1 session with a crochet needle can take as long as 6 months to recover. And continued use will damage them so much that it can be years before they can loosen up enough to fix themselves.
You can start at three inches, but need wax or crochet hooks.
But if you are going the natural route, you can start at any length. You might not see much progress till it is a bit longer. You'll see some sectioning, but it might not start to clump together for a little while.
Could be. Some locks just blunt on their own. If you could gently brush them loose, I'd recommend it. But like you said, if you would have to take scissors to them, then just let them be and be careful with how you dry
I tried that too, Eagle. And a lot for a while. It did nothing. Like you said. All I saw was frayed cricknled tips that never blunted
You'll have to wait till they are fully mature before you blunt the tips. You need the rest of the hair to be firmly in place and know that it wont untangle. If you do it in the beginning stages, you will just have loose tips again because the sections came undone, like thy will for months and months. In about a year, you should be mature enough to know that your locks are not going anywhere. But then you might not want to blunt them. You might have grown to like it.
That said, I blunted 1 to see what would happen. I hated it. I still haven't tried to brush it out, but I will probably one of these days. Many of mine blunted on their own. They now take about 8 hours longer to dry that they did when they were loose.
I took a pair of grooming scissors and snipped off the wispy ends. In a few weeks the few loose hairs left matted and got sucked into the body of the lock. It looks fully blunted now. And no damage was done. But I waited 6 years to do this. You'll have to wait at least a full year
Dreadlocks are clumped together knotty hair. That doesn't happen if the hair is left straight. That bunching up is your hair tangling in on itself. It has to happen for locks to mature. In time, most of those bumps will get so absorbed into the lock that it'll just look like a bit of texture. It won't look like a hugecystgrowing out of your locks
There are tons of people here that post pics of their wiggles. Check out Heather's page.
Your's look great. But check out my video on how damaging that much palm rolling is. If you keep it up, you can irrevocably destroy your roots
Funny enough, I watched a video about how people cheat those scanners. This guy made a gun holster that layed flat against his side. In some of the body scanners, anything that is metal will show up black against your skin which shows up white. With the gun on the side, it was flat enough that a frontal image did not pick it up. So even with the most high body scanners, you could still get a gun or other metal objects through customs.
I'm not sure how SA's customs are. A friend of mine from there (He moved to the US when he was 16) never had anything really bad to say about it
If you're with your parents, you probably don't have anything to worry about. And being 16 is a plus. They just wont expect much from you anyway. They're TSA. I respect what they do, but they can be pretty rude.
I'm 26 and my locks are nappy and some stick out all over the place. I have a beard, and when I don't shave for a while (I'll go 3 months at a time without trimming it) I tend to look more middle Eastern than I actually am). But I still haven't been pulled aside
