TO TRIM OR NOT TO TRIM!!

Hiya,

I am so sorry for my somewhat neglect of this blog all week long, It hasn’t been intentional, hope you all have not abandoned me J

Oh Well, let’s get down to business. Have you ever been in the chair of a stylist and endured comments by the stylist regarding how bad you need a trim and how your ends are so light because you have not gotten a trim and how all your hair will keep falling out if you do not get a trim!While there might be some truth to what the stylist is saying, please do not buckle under his/her pressure until you know these basic facts!

The First Facts is; There is a HUGE difference between hair that is SHEDDING and hair that is BREAKING!! Shedding is a normal occurrence for hair, every hair strand goes through a cycle and at the end of its cycle the hair strand will come off from its root(look out for a white tip). Because the strands individually fall off at different times due to different cycles, it is expected that when you comb your hair as one hilarious stylist put it to me, HAIR MUST CUT!! But that stylist was wrong, if she knew what she really was talking about she should have said, HAIR MUST SHED! However too much Shedding can be a problem but Trimming will not solve it, there are other methods to stop over shedding that I will discuss in future.

 Hair must not cut, when hair is ‘cutting’ then it is breaking and breaking is caused primarily by SPLIT ENDS! One of my favorite past times is dealing with my split ends! A split end as the name implies, is when the ends of your hair split into two. This can be cause by various elements; heat, chemical treatment, too much hair manipulation or using blunt scissors to cut your hair. Split ends are inevitable! Every body has split ends even Oprah!! Lol. The only difference between a healthy head of hair and an unhealthy one is the VOLUME of split ends it has! Split ends are no good, so for healthy ends, when you see a split end you clip it off with a sharp hair cutting scissors, if you do not do that your hair can break off from the split and that’s what causes thin ends.

 A simple illustration should make all this clear; HAIR STRAND A and B start out their wonderful hair cycle together, every thing is fine and dandy until one dreaded day while A and B are chilling in Hairville, the dreaded HOT CURLING IRON lands on Strand A! ‘Ouch!! That must have hurt’ thought Strand B, and as Strand B braces itself for the impact of Hot curling Iron, the Landlord of Hairville remembers to use some heat protection on Strand B. Whew!  Strand B is now protected and the Hot Curling Iron doesn’t harm Strand B. The next day, as landlord is raking through the field of Hairville with Her Comb, Strand A all weak and exhausted gets caught in the teeth of her comb and Strand B watches as Strand A who was her size yesterday, becomes 3inches shorter with a  very bad K leg(split)!!:( Sad Story!! Now do you see my point or my illustration has confused you further!! Lol!

 Well, let’s get down to Fact 2; I don’t know if you have heard this before, but ill tell it again, Trimming your hair WILL NOT per say make it grow longer! FACT! Do not let that Stylist lie to you again. The only thing as I tried to illustrate above, is that rather than you allow your ends to come off indiscriminately and thin out thereby causing you to have unhealthy looking hair, a trim will take out those dead ends and leave your ends looking FULLER as a result and that will not necessarily lead to LONGER hair. Longer Hair will come as a result of how well you can retain your ends in between relaxer treatments using a combination of techniques including but not limited to keeping the split ends at bay. So do not sit back abandon your hair for months in a weave and take the weave out and trim your ends in hopes of longer hair, doesn't work that way.

The third Fact is, there is a major difference between a hair CUT and a TRIM! If you cut off anything  beyond one and a half inches, its a hair cut. Below is a before and after picture of my trimmed ends.

By all means if you need a hair cut, get one! But if you go in for a trim and your stylist tries to give you a hair cut, please speak up or its your fault for letting the stylist take out your healthy ends and set you back in your hair journey.

Now I have let you in on these facts, I trust that the next time you get to the salon and your stylist says you need a trim, you will know whether you do or not and to what extent. Generally you could get a trim every time you get a relaxer but please don't let them trim your hair when it's wet, because wet hair has more elasticity and can give a false illusion of longer hair so its better to trim your dry ends so you get an accurate idea of how much hair needs to go and the ends usually come out sharper. 

For those of you who would rather do your trims yourself, I have two methods Ill recommend; 'The Seek and Destroy' method which is actually what I talked about above, where you section your hair and systematically look for split ends and clip them off. The other method is what Ill call 'The Gliding Finger method' (See Picture Above) You take a section of your hair and using one finger behind the section, push forward and then use the other two fingers to glide the hair over the middle finger, as you do so, closely look at the ends that stick out and clip off the split ends. Finally, when dealing with split ends make sure you are under BRIGHT light because it will best highlight them. Wanna know how a split end looks? Below is my attempt at taking a picture of a split end from my head of hair. See how the end divides into two strands!

I will stop here for now, hope this post was helpful and hope you now know when to trim or not to trim. Keep the comments coming, send a message and  I'll gladly respond. Thanks for stopping by!

Stop by soon,

Dabs