I Haven’t Brushed My Hair in Two Years?!
I have long, thick, curly, brown hair. Until I turned 16, my hair went past my lower back. After I got it cut to donate it to Locks of Love, I never went back.
Long hair is high maintenance and took way to much time for me personally. Before I cut my hair, I could barely lift my head out of a swimming pool, took me four hours to blow dry it, and went through four massive bottles of conditioner a month. No more!
After I got it cut, my mom had health problems and started implementing a more ‘holistic’ way of living in our house. She did her thing, told us about what she found, but let us make our own decisions.
One of her new discoveries was that brushing curly hair is bad. It gives you split ends because of the increased friction due to the curls and actually damages your curl shape. So she stopped brushing her hair.
She still washed it, she’s a very clean person. But she just didn’t brush her hair. Soon my sisters followed suit, and they all had long Disney-Princess-like hair within the month.
I, debatably the family skeptic, dismissed their hippy ways and continued ramming my hair through a brush every day.
But one day, I decided to give it a try. Why not? It worked for them. So I chose not to brush my hair for a week. My routine went like so:
Get up
Shower
Shampoo/Condition hair
Scrunch hair with wet t-shirt to maintain curl (shirt has less friction than towel due to no rough cotton loop thingies)
Scrunch hair with gel to keep curl in
That was it. It was much less stressful and painful than my previously 47 minute operation on my scalp each morning. I never went back.
I honestly don’t know the science behind it, but my hair is amazing. I’m not one of the girls who fawns over herself for validation, but this improved how my whole day went. More manageable, more time in the morning, and super soft hair.
I used to have a real problem with dandruff, that went away as well. It turns out that my brush was irritating my scalp so much it was trying to shout at me, saying “Knock it off! That hurts!!!”.
So I haven’t brushed my hair in two years, and it’s amazing. I keep it clean, I experiment with new hair products like anyone else. I just choose not to rake through my scalp every morning for 47 minutes anymore. And you know what? I love it.
SURVIVAL OF THE SAVVY 