How can I avoid frizzy hair on rainy days?

The vast majority of the questions I most often get asked on Black hair care have some sort of breakage problem involved, and a great percentage of those involve a relaxer. So to answer your question, lets first start by talking about how our hair is made. Each hair on our head is produced inside its own individual follicle, which is located just beneath the surface of the scalp.

This follicle is a complex biosynthesis unit that takes in from the small veins in your scalp amino acids and polypeptides and assembles them into a soft protein. This soft protein is then separated into specialized cells which will eventually make up the fibrils and matrix of the hair's cortex and the scale like cells of its outer cuticle layer. As these parts are assembled and move toward the surface they become hardened or "keratinized" and come out of the opening of the follicle as the dead protein keratin structure we call hair.

Afro textured hair as it comes out from the follicle and is keratinized is formed into an irregular elliptical shape in cross section that most experts agree is responsible for the way this type of hair grows into tight coils instead of straight. The rounder the cross section of the hair as it emerges from the follicle, the straighter it grows, with the very straightest being Asian type hair. The hair we see is made up three parts, the outside or the cuticle layer which resemble fish scales or the shingles on a roof and there are as many as 15 or as little as 2 layers on top of each other.

The cortex, which makes up the main mass of the hair and is responsible for its elasticity, strength and contains the pigment particles that give hair its colour. It is in this area that any chemicals applied to hair perform most of their transformation action. The cortex is comprised of thousands of fibrils and these fibrils can best be described as rope like, in that each fibril is made of many smaller fibers twisted around one another.

Finally, there is the medulla at the center of the hair shaft. This is a hollow area and not everyone's hair has a medulla and it is generally thought of as functionally unimportant. Now as this hair grows many things are done to it, the most common being is just to cut it.

After that the most frequent choice people make to alter their hair's appearance are chemical services such as colouring or perming. People chose to do these kinds of services for a vast variety of reasons, the most common of which, in my opinion, is just a personal fashion choice. So now we have ended up with virgin hair that we have decided to do a relaxing service to, the most common chemical service done on Black hair.

To make this next part as easy to understand as possible I will use a 1 - 10 scale, with 1 being virgin hair that is well looked after and in good condition and 10 being dry, brittle, severely damaged hair with extreme breakage problems. When a relaxer is done on virgin hair, the hair can be taken to anywhere from a 2 on the scale, to a 10 on the scale. This applies for every time you re-relax the hair or do a "touch-up" service in the future.

Where you end up - and I can't repeat this enough - is entirely dependent on the skill and experience of the person doing the relaxing service. I've seen instances of where on their very first relaxer, almost always done by a friend or themselves, people have gone straight to 10. A professional hair stylist's job is to use her skills and experience to consistently move you no further along the scale than is absolutely necessary in accomplishing her job.

Part of the reason that Wash & Wear Relaxer™ came about was because of my very firm belief that taking hair to a bone straight state, absolutely takes a client further along the scale than I was happy with and that by leaving texture in the hair it was stronger, healthier and has much more body to support a finished style for a longer period of time. Even if our Wash & Wear Relaxer™ isn't for you and want your hair very straight, hair should not ever in my opinion be taken past 95% if bone straight equals 100%. The exception to this is short hair that is wrapped, this can be and should be taken bone straight since ending up with length will not be a concern.

Hair isn't complicated it's like anything else - abuse, neglect and mishandle it and it will break or wear out. More often than I would like to say, I see people who are seriously abusing their hair and then wonder why it's breaking. Next, let's talk about exactly how a relaxer works.

When applied, the relaxer swells the hair and the relaxer enters the cortex area causing irreversible changes. Once in the cortex the relaxer's job is to permanently break the cohesive disulfide bonds found there that hold the hair together. As these bonds are progressively broken a loosening of the curl pattern of the hair takes place, until the desired texture is achieved.

The more bonds that are broken the further along the scale you move as these bonds are responsible for the hair's strength - its that simple. So when hair is over processed the relaxer has been allowed to process too long, which breaks much too many of the bonds that hold the hair together as a cohesive unit. There then is just nothing left inside to keep the hair together, intact and whole.

That is what happens when hair is over-processed with a relaxer. Then you add on hot curling and blow drying, improper brushing or combing, improper shampooing and conditioning techniques, poor choices in hair care products and especially colouring relaxed hair with improper procedures, it doesn't take long to push your hair over into the breakage zone. Now very little stress of any kind to the hair will cause breakage, which sometimes can be quite severe.

For people who relax their hair and are experiencing breakage problems, this is the sequence of events that usually leads up to their hair coming off. Occasionally I also get asked by people how they can ensure that their hair isn't being over-processed. My response is usually to find a good professional stylist.

One critical choice a good professional hairstylist will make in relaxing your hair, is to use their experience and skills in the amount of processing time required as well adjusting the amount of relaxer she uses on different areas of your head. Some people experience breakage because their hair is all processed the same with regards to processing time and amounts of relaxer applied. When the fact of the matter is a that many people have texture and diameter of hair differences present on their head.

This means if the same amount of relaxer and processing time is done to the whole head, for someone this applies to, some areas may end up being under-processed, some processed correctly and some over-processed. If you are experiencing breakage in specific areas of your head with no reasonable explanation, this could be a cause.