Ask JAS: Detangling Matted Hair

A couple of weeks ago, at 3AM in the morning -_-, my cousin called and asked the following question for his girlfriend lol

• "How do you detangle matted hair? like, reallyyyy matted hair? My girlfriend is transitioning to natural hair and had braids in her hair. She took them out and like how good her braid out look and didn't wash/comb her hair for a week or so, so when she went to finally wash her hair, it became really tangled as soon as she put it under warm water. What should she do?

Jameka's Answer: First, #fail for leaving the hair out for so long without manipulating it lol. Tell her next time to use a wide tooth comb in it and rebraid it at night if she wants to preserve the style.  Hair sheds about 50-100 hairs a day. If  her hair was in the braids for awhile, calculate how much hair needs to be "removed". For example, if the braids were in for 12 days, there's about 600-1200 hairs that should have came out so at the time of removing the braids, it was in need of some serious detangling. Allowing the hair to be loose in the braid out on top of that allowed the hair to "curl up on itself" and become detangled on top of already needing to be combed to remove the shed hair.

As for detangling, the warm water most likely made it become even more detangled. Most times, detangling is a step done during conditioning and you may see optimal results if you use cold water. Tell her to wet the hair with cold water, put it in sections, apply a generous amount of conditioner to each section and gently comb through each section from end to root (bottom to top) of the hair to rid herself of the tangles. It may require a lot of conditioner, so you may want to buy a bottle of cheapie shampoo like Suave or V05 (it can be found for $0.99 in some places) to use. These conditioners are known to have great slip which helps when detangling.

Sierra's Answer: Yikes!!!! Well ironically I had the same thing happen to me when I loved my twist out... that I used lock gel to twist :( I'm definitely cosigning to everything Jameka said. My hair was matted so bad I almost cut it off myself before running to the beauty parlor first thing the next morning. Always, always, always start combing from the tips of the hair. As Jameka said, the leftover hair is still in there so starting from the root could just comb it to the tips causing a hairball effect and the ends. And getting hair stuck at the ends might cause the hair to snap if you pull or worse, you might have to cut it out.

I say once a month she may want to use a hair mayonnaise treatment. It's like taking your hair to the spa. It helps it look better, shine, makes it soft and strong, and helps to detangle. Plus it's something that you can leave in that won't get matted in your hair, which is what I like because I have a bad habit of just leaving my hair like whatever for days.