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Natural Hair Types: Everything You Need to Know
We all heard about the hair typing chart; it’s pretty popular in the natural hair community. You see all these YouTube videos for “type 3 hair” or “type 4 hair.” The question is: how relevant is the curl typing system when it comes to actually developing a hair care routine?
Let’s get into some facts!
The curl typing chart is basically a classification system for hair types. It was created in the 1990s by Oprah’s hair stylist, Andre Walker. He created this to market his own product line. With that being said, there’s really no science behind hair typing. It’s just used to describe what the curls look like. Type 1 hair is straight, type 2 hair is wavy, type 3 hair are loose curls, and type 4 hair are tighter coils.
Does your curl pattern matter when it comes to choosing products?
We know that “YouTube University” taught you all about the different hair types and what products you should use for yours but unfortunately, everything they promote will not work for you. Just because someone’s curls look very similar to yours does not mean you can use the same products they use. Say for instance, you have low porosity, type “4B” hair and you watch another girl who has 4B hair but it’s high porosity and she does protein treatments, if you follow what she does, your hair will literally break off. That’s because low porosity hair already has enough protein so adding more protein will just make it snap off. If you want to follow someone else’s hair care regimen, at least make sure they have the same porosity and density as you because if not, you risk destroying your hair and there will be nobody else to blame but yourself.
So, is the curl typing chart completely useless?
The curl typing system plays absolutely no role when it comes to developing a hair care regimen; the most important things are porosity and density. The ONLY thing that the curl typing system helps you with is finding clip-ins or any type of extensions to blend in with your natural hair. If you don’t ever plan on wearing extensions that match your hair, you can honestly disregard the hair typing system.
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