Progress Report! One Year in

Wow. I'm already 1 year into my hair journey.

First thing's first...how did my hair do? Lets take a look.

From left to right. I'm currently at shoulder length

So not too bad. Pretty good actually but not as good as I'd hoped.  It is pretty easy to forget that long hair youtubers like prettywitty77 (check her out she's pretty cool) have been growing their hair for years and years. It takes time and patience.



However, I have to be honest and admit that I didn't exactly help my hair along. Here are some of the things I did over the past twelve months to make my hair not as healthy as it could be.


1. I stopped the GHE method on a regular basis. GHE stands for Green House Effect and it was developed by the ladies over at realqueens. The main concept is to stimulate the scalp so that it increases its production of sebum (hair oil) to help nourish your hair and help it grow. Since I don't have a problem growing hair, the real benefit of GHE to me is it helps keeps my ends nice and moist.

2. I tried the weave protective style...and failed. I tried to use weaves as a protective style twice. The weave method I chose was to leave out a little bit of my own hair. That was a bad decision. The hair that was left out was dry, developed dandruff and broke off rather dramatically. I'm doubly upset because the hair that broke off is very fast growing so I lost a lot of inches.

3. I neglected my ends. I don't have a problem growing my hair...the real challenge is retaining that length. And length retention means focusing tender loving care on the ends which are the oldest and driest and fragile-est (yes...my made up word) and also making sure the line of demarcation stays strong.  Due to my weave sagas and two unfortunate detangling sessions during my last stretch...this hasn't been as successful as I'd have liked.

So here's what I'm going to do for the next 6 months of 2014.

1. Protect those ends. This means end focused moisturizing, end focused bagging/sealing and end focused lurving.

2. DC weekly to keep the strands as uber moist as possible. and GHE as often as I can. The real queens recommend doing it every night but my scalp is quite sensitive to damp so I'm going to keep it to the last couple of days of the week. Maybe Thursday night through Sunday.

3. New protective style. I bought a wig! (finally). I'd been lurking on the interwebs checking out reviews of the sensationnel fab fringe wig for aaages. I finally caved and bought one. I'll do a review when I get it. That's going to be my new protective style for the summer (maybe winter). My hair really does best when it's left alone. I think I move it around too much and I get a bit impatient when it comes to detangling etc so it might be best to just leave it be.

With a wig I can take it off at the end of the day, moisturise the braids and not have to do a lot of manipulation. I might even try washing while in braids...see how that works.

How's your progress been going? Remember that it takes love and patience to get your hair long. Hang tight! Stay Positive!