When you have natural hair, getting it to match your hair extensions for extended periods of time can range from being difficult to being downright impossible.
Hydrogen bonds in your hair are weak bonds that can be changed temporarily by heat or by water. We all know that we can change the shape of our hair temporarily by way of a flat iron or roller setting to change the curl pattern. When you do this, you are in essence changing the shape of the hydrogen bonds in your hair strands making the hair remain in the shape of the tool used (flat iron or roller).
Water will immediately destroy these temporary bonds so that when you wash your hair, it returns to it’s original shape. Water in the atmosphere also known as humidity does the same thing as drenching your hair with water but at a much slower pace.
You will notice that when you straighten your natural kinky curly hair for the first time, it will start to ‘poof’ up and will be well on the way towards resuming it’s natural shape in a few hours. This applies even when you just set your hair in rods or in a braid out, after a day of humid weather, you will notice that your hair start loosing the curls trying to return to it’s natural state. With straight haired women, after adding curls, in a few hours they ‘fall’ as humidity gets to the hair and tries to restore the natural straight shape.
For natural ladies wanting to change up their style this can be disaster. It would seem that the world is conspiring to prevent you from trying out any new hairstyles. This is a major reason why many natural ladies opt not to leave any hair out when installing weaves or choosing weaves that are as close to their texture as possible.
Unfortunately it is not always possible to get your hands on hair extensions that exactly match your natural hair and for this reason some ladies compromise with kinky curly, deep wavy or some other such curly extension. But even then some styling of your leave out hair will be necessary.
How To Deal With The Humidity
There are a special class of hair products called anti-humectants or humidity blockers. They are often made primarily from water resistant silicones or a variety of oils that serve a similar pupose of being imprevious to water.
When you apply the product to your hair before or very shortly after styling, they work primarily by preventing moisture from getting into your strands. The silicone or oil molecules are larger than water molecules and as such they block the water molecules from penetrating the hair strand.
Now anti-humectants are not permanently impervious to water, depending on the amount used, they will usually after a few days become vulnerable to humidity again. What this means for you is that that your styles will last much longer before you have to re-do them again, a wonderful thing for natural hair.
Shampooing
When you add anti-humectants to your hair regimen, you will need to step up on shampooing your hair at least weekly too. A lot of natural ladies prefer to co-wash their hair (washing hair with conditioner only) and this is ok if you are not using lots of silicone and oil containing products. But if you use silicones, especially the water resistant ones contained in anti-humectants, not properly cleansing your hair would lead to build up which would then cause breakage.
Examples of anti humectant products are Sabino Moisture Block & Aveda Brilliant Anti Humectant Pomade.
