I like to write, but I'm not chatty, so this journal's going to be focused mostly on my hair. Bikerbraid invited me to introduce myself a while back, but since that didn't happen...here I am.

My hair is fine, straight with a little wave at the ends only, and medium-thick. When wet it forms long, stretched-out corkscrews, but when dry, the weight seems to make it appear completely straight. I think if it was medium or coarse instead of fine, it would show its curl, but we'll never know.

My sister was born a towhead, and gradually darkened to medium brown, hair that I remember as stick-straight, but shows a wave at the ends in old photos. I always had darkest brown hair, although the ends tended to fade to chestnut.

I remember getting perms as a small child, both at home and in salons, where I saw ladies getting their white hair tinted blue and lavender, which I still think is pretty cool. Perms? Not cool. Putting a small child in rollers on a regular basis is foolishness. My natural hair was perfectly fine.

I have a photo of myself in the 5th grade, with uneven shoulder-length hair with a natural flip. The next year, my hair was longer and blunt cut, and my mother cut my bangs about 1¼" long, which made them curl up like a fifties movie star. Really, really uncool, when bangs were supposed to be long and straight, tapering around your browline.

When I was in junior high, bubbleheads were in style, and I tried my hardest, but fine silky hair doesn't pouf well, even with tons of dippity-do and hairspray. I slept poorly on rollers, and repeated visits to my mother's beauty parlor couldn't change my natural hair characteristics. By the time I was in high school, I resolved to grow my hair long. At some point the bangs grew out, and I stopped cutting my hair. After I went to college, then left it, I had one of those trims that was supposed to be an inch, but turned into 6", and the impossibility of finding a compatible stylist meant I never bothered to get my hair cut.

At 19, I got a job in a factory, and I remember the women remarking about how much hair was caught in my hairbrush, so I must have been wearing it loose then. Later, my hair got longer, and I started braiding it and leaving it braided for a day or two between washes. Finally it reached my knees, and I was unable to brush it myself. So I cut it off, tired of being unstylish for so long. Then: bad perm, self-haircuts, bad salon haircut, sigh.  Since that time I've let it grow out a couple of times, and for a long time it had been touching my waist and breaking off there.

But no more. Now that I'm taking care of my hair (CO washing, conditioning, oiling, wearing updos) it's growing visibly longer. I just started measuring my hair at the beginning of April, so I don't have much to compare with, but today I realized that last September, the students in my class measured my hair (from the center part to the ends) as part of a metric experiment, and it came to 24". The ends are now 31" using that method, and I've had a 2½" trim, so wow, that's a lot of growth. 9½" in 10 months! It doesn't seem to be growing so fast lately, but I have to touch up the roots even when my length doesn't appear to increase. It must be something happening with my wavies, because conditioning seems to draw out curl and waves (a little bit).

My mother has peachy skin with pale freckles, and always colored her hair red. My father is olive. I have ivory skin with brown freckles in the sun, which I have always avoided like the plague. I figured I should be a redhead with my coloring, and when the gray started to make me look washed out, I did it. There's a post in the thread on touching up roots where I posted my hair care routine, which involves CO wash with a clarifying conditioner, moisturizing conditioner, clairol creme conditioner, leave-in spritzers and oil. I'm not going to copy it here, but I assure you all, it will come up again.

My current moisturizing conditioner containes one silicone, and I thought I'd try this, since some people like cones. I've probably used something with silicones in the past, as I've never read ingredients on a label before.

This summer I've been mostly wearing my hair in a ponytail, but when school starts again I'll be wearing it up most of the time again, either in a bun or some variation of a crown braid. The flash failed on my camera, so I can't post you any new pictures right now.

Today I got a huge compliment from the guy who owns the natural food that I've patronized for 25 years. So I must be doing something right. Crown braids get noticed a lot, too.

I take biotin and silica for my hair, though it's impossible to tell if they've had any effect. And I eat meat, as hair is made of protein. My hair grows twice as fast as my duighter's, and I eat more meat than her. Coincidence? I think not.

More later.

Last night I did another Cholesterol Creme treatment, this one a little different.

First of all, I wanted to see if the stuff worked better if my hair had no conditioners on it first, so after COing with Suave Daily Clarifying Conditioner (which actually doesn't have much conditioning effect), I didn't apply my usual two other conditioners.

Remember how the label said to apply generously to the hair, add some water, and lather up? Last time that didn't work out, so this time I took ¼ cup and mixed it with an ounce of warm water first, making it about the consistency of mayonnaise. It applied easily, and the amount was about right.

After the heat treatment, I rinsed it out in the sink, and dang! it was tangly, as if it were not conditioned. At this point it was bedtime, so I went to bed with it wet. It rained all night, and this morning I woke up with my hair still seriously damp, and still behaving unconditioned. So after a couple of hours, I couldn't stand the thought of my hair being unconditioned, and jumped in the shower. I applied a VO5 without cones, a VO5 with cones, and a dab of Clairol post-haircolor conditioner,  which goes a long way when you use it like this.

So my hair is happy again, showing those cute wavies around the end that it does when I supercondition.

Whew!

Just CO washed my hair, and while it drips, I was thinking about terminal length, which is being discussed on a different part of this board.

What is terminal length? Is it

• the length at which hair stops growing?
• the length that a hair reaches and immediately falls out?
• how long hair gets, given how we're treating it?

The first possibility would mean that we could have terminal-length hair that was in reasonable condition at the ends, tapering slightly to reflect the cycle of hair growth.

Clearly for the second and third cases, the ends will be shaggy, and the hair will taper to nothingness at the bottom.

How can we tell the difference between these?

If we measure the ponytail and count the number of hairs in a much smaller rope, we can approximate how many hairs are on a person's head. Carefully save the hairs (with roots) you lose over a period of a month, and find out what percentage you are losing.

If a person had 100,000 hairs, and their hair had reached its terminal length at 25" (here I'm assuming that all sections of the head measure at 25", not the typical measurement from the hairline back), according to the second option above, they would be losing 2% of their hair each month. This comes to a hair loss of 2,000 hairs a month! Sixty seven hairs a day! It's hard to believe that hair loss like this would go unnoticed.

I currently am losing hardly any hair, just a few with each shampoo.

But it occurred to me, sitting here with damp hair, waiting for it to dry, that I had enough time to actually figure out how many hairs I had on my head. 

I also found that it's really tedious and unreliable to try to count such fine hair.

I counted a "bunch" of hair, twisted firmly into a little string measuring 1/16" diameter. In this string were 377 hairs.

The area of that 1/16" bunch of hair was .00307 square inches. My ponytail on top of the head (where it measures thickest) is 4", which has an area of 1.27 square inches. So if I have 122,801 hairs per square inch I have approximately 156,000 hairs on my head.

So if it seems like I'm only losing 10 full-length hairs a week, let's say 50 a month, that would give my hair a "growth period" of 3,120 months, which would be a length of 1,560 inches, or 130 feet.

Clearly my #1 hair growth adversary is not terminal length, but hair damage.

That is a gorgeous look, eKatherine.

/Kate

I made an appointment this morning for a trim next Tuesday. <<shudder>>
It must be that it's July, but those thin ends that I didn't take off during my last trim are now bugging the heck out of me, even though there's no new damage. My stylist wanted to take off 2½" more last time, but I was chicken. Now I wonder what I should do.

Even though it means adding a bunch of extra time before I reach classic. Maybe I'll just do half of that.

But I don't really want to leave it alone, then reach classic and immediately have to drastically trim it in order not to be ashamed of how pitiful the ends might look.

Dither dither. Waffle waffle. Pix soon.

Yesterday I CO washed my hair, nothing special, to prepare for my trim this morning, bright and early @ 7:30am.

First the stylist said something to the effect that, "We're taking off two or three inches...?", but I told him that this time it was 1¼", which is exactly what came off. There was lots more hair on the floor than the last trim.  Last time I only had wispies trimmed at the ends.  Sometime after the holidays, I should be able to get my last significant trim to remove damaged ends.

Here's a pic comparing before and after:



They were taken in the same room, but I've replaced some of the bulbs with brighter fluorescents. I think I should go brighter still for better definition.

I just downloaded a gif animator off the web, so here's an animation of my last three length shots:



The order of the pictures is last trim (April/May?)-last week-after trim.

Last night I decided to wash my hair, and knowing that come fall, I won't be able to baby it every washday, I figured I'd try a double heat treatment, which is something I'll be able to do on the weekends.

I slicked my hair with the light oil mixture I had made previously (macadamia oil, jojoba, tea tree oil, sweet orange oil - all of which smells like an insect repellent), put on a shower cap to keep evaporation down, and put on the heat cap for about half an hour. Then, into the shower, scrub with Suave Daily Clarifying, then White Rain Extra Body. Out of the shower, I towel-dried, and applied some Queen Helene Cholesterol Creme that I had diluted with 50% water.

(Reading the label on this, now, it looks like it's full of hydrating stuff, maybe it could make a good hydrating rinse before my final detangling, even without the heat cap.) 

On with the shower cap and heat cap again, another 1/2 hour at the computer, rinse out, apply Pantene Pro-V, rinse again. Then, out of the shower, towel dry, and put jojoba through my wet ends, especially around the nape, where the hairs are totally damaged, and sideburn area, where none of the hairs grow longer than 8".

It's morning now, but I'll tell you, my hair took forever to dry. I ended going to bed with the hair wet, so I couldn't post results last night.

It wonderfully thick, full, and silky, and sort of perfumey, from the Queen Helene fragrance.

My braid is now 3-5/8" around at the nape, and 2" around at the bottom band, which is about 13" from the neckline. The last band of a band-wrapped pony, about 2" from the bottom, is now about 1-1/2" around. So my ends are evening up.

My hair feels so short again! I want tailbone!

Thanks, babyfine.

Today I was reading about scalp wash on the LHC boards. It's been really hot and sticky today, my face keeps dripping with grease, and I realized that I was ready to try scalp wash. I needed to take a quick shower and I wanted to wash my hair, even though my hair surely wasn't dirty yet.  But I definitely didn't need to spend all that time in the shower, doing my routine.  Nor did I want to have wet hair for hours.

Lady Godiva puts her pony in a baggie when she does her scalp wash, but I had a feeling this wasn't going to work well for me.

What I did was to put my hair in a scrunchy high up on the back of my head and pull the scrunchy loose about 3" off the scalp. I braided the length, fastened with an elastic band, and put a clinch clip in at the end of the braided part.
I tied a piece of elastic around the end of the braid, so the clip kept it from slipping off, put a loop in the other end, and hung it on a hook over my kitchen sink.  (I'll bet this looked pretty funny.)  Then I turned the water on, sprayed down my scalp, massaged in white rain, rinsed well, and wrapped a towel around the wet part.

It was much quicker than I thought it was going to be, and my hair is clean and damp on the scalp, and clean and silky on the ends. Just a dab of jojoba around the hairline, where the fuzzies break off, and I was finished.

It was, in fact, easier than pie, and a lot quicker.

This has real potential.