Many times during your natural hair journey you will hear about protective hairstyles for hair growth.
Irrespective of if you are a fan of protective styles or not, it is unavoidable as long as your goal is healthy long natural hair.
What are Protective Styles?
Over the years, the term protective styles seems to have lost its true meaning.
What is protective styling for natural hair?
Protective styles are styles that help you retain and maintain your natural hair as it grows.
There are two main types of protective styles for natural hair.
- Complete Protective Styles
- Low manipulation Protective styles
Complete Protective Styles
A complete protective style helps to keep the ends of your hair absolutely hidden from view and they are achieved without heat and protect your natural hair 100%
Low Manipulation Protective Styles
This second type of protective styling is for hairstyles that partially expose the ends of the hair to an extent but they reduce the wear and tear of everyday styling. For example, twist outs and braid outs.
The Best Protective Hairstyles for Hair Growth
Now that you know the true meaning of protective styles, here are 3 of my top protective hairstyles for retaining length as my natural hair grows.
- Two flat twists – This is probably the most complete protective style I can wear almost throughout the whole year. It is fast and easy to do and I can wear it to work and also during my everyday activities. However, what I love the most about it is, it is easy to sleep in and easy to take care of. I just simply moisturize every 2-3 days and I am good to go.
2. Twists – My second best protective style is twists. these are way easier to do especially if you don’t know how to flat twist yet.
I have tutorials on 3 ways to flat twist and my most popular video on my channel on how to twist properly for twist outs will help you learn fast.
3. High Buns – are one of my favorite protective styles. I particularly like a high bun because it can be styled in so many ways as you can see from my video on 8 bun variations.
It also allows me to have access to the perimeter of my head with ease.
Wearing your natural hair in a bun with the ends hidden is a complete protective style.
However, wearing your natural hair in a bun with the ends exposed i.e. a puff, is a low manipulation protective style.
In addition, always make sure you keep your buns from being too tight as you don’t want your protective style to become damaging.
Tight styles lead to tension around your edges and girl… you don’t want to loose your edges.
These same rules apply to low bun hairstyles and updo hairstyles.
Do Protective Hairstyles help hair grow?
The insinuation that protective styles help grow your natural hair is a popular misconception in the natural hair community.
As I mentioned above, protective styles on natural hair only help to maintain your hair as it ‘already’ grows.
You can find various examples of protective styles here on my blog or if you are a visual learner you can find a plethora of styles on my YouTube channel.
How long should you leave your hair in a protective style?
It is recommended that if you install hair extensions, wear wigs or weaves, the best timeframe is 4 weeks. However, if you wear only your natural hair as a protective style, you can wear it for as long as 6weeks.
This is because you can still deep condition your natural hair regularly even though it is in a protective style with only your natural hair.
I hope this clears all your questions about what a protective style is and if you want more tips and tricks for hair growth, you can find them in my book here.
