Lost Locs

In the comments on my last post regarding my milestone of reaching waist length hair,

Anonymous said...
brenda...absolutely beautiful...the length is simply amazing...i was reading an older post on tai's blog where he talked about how easy it is to lose locks, particularly when you wash them once they get really long because of the weight if they are thin...you often mention that you have thin hair(though none of us can tell)...have you found this to be a problem when you wash your hair?

Thinking back through the 61/2 years that I’ve had Sisterlocks, I believe I’ve inadvertently lost only one whole loc that I know of from breakage, as opposed to the bottom tips. That was probably about two years ago and here it is now. It was rather interesting getting it restarted since I had never gone through the baby loc stages with short hair (I was a relaxed transitioner) and keeping that short one in the loc pattern was trying at times – I probably had to restart it several times and fix a lot of slippage. I also inadvertently cut at least one that I know of because, unfortunately, I don’t have eyes in the back of my head (yeah, I was trying to separate a stubborn one with scissors and…snip!).

As I said before, my hair is thin, mostly in the top crown area. My vanity notwithstanding, and as a public service to those who might think they won’t look good with SL’s because of thinning, I’m posting a picture so you can get an idea of what I’m talking about. Although I’d like it to be otherwise, I’ve learned to style strategically! Additionally, I just finished my retightening about 9 days before this picture was taken and I hadn’t yet washed my hair. From a scalpiness perspective, I usually like my hair better after the second week or at least after a wash to put some of the fuzziness back in the root area. In fact, if I don’t have time for a wash, I’ll just spritz my scalp with water to get the newly retightened portion to swell a little.



Having said all that, I don’t actually have the same number of locks as I originally started out with. I’ve had to combine some, mostly for two reasons: they were too thin for my liking to begin with and because my hair has thinned in the crown area. But I should add that any thinning I’ve had is probably hereditary and was exacerbated by prior relaxers and having children and not from the SL’s. You can see an example in this picture of one that I’ve combined and, yeah, I leave them two-headed. I should also add that I haven’t combined any for about 2 years now (except for one back in December that was unintentional and I couldn’t get it back out, though I tried). So I guess I haven’t been thinning lately.

So, Anonymous, I don’t think I’ve lost any while washing or separating my hair. I can understand how that might happen, especially in the shower, which is where I wash mine. As it gets longer, it does get heavier, as a mass, and even more so when wet, although each individual one doesn’t feel very heavy on its own. I just make sure that I don’t wash my hair overly vigorously and I don’t move the wet hair around a lot. I usually just stick my fingertips in and massage the scalp and then squeeze the suds through the length.