Considering Starting Dreadlocks?

Thinking about starting dreadlocks but still trying to decide whether they are right for you? Check out the pros & cons here!

One Year Of Lazy Dreads Challenge Video!

The Lazy Dreads Youtube channel has now been around for 1 year! To celebrate I've accepted some challenges put forward by the Lazy Dreads Facebook group!

Lazydreads T-shirts

The Lazydreads T-shirts are now available through Zazzle. I originally only planned on creating T-shirts for myself, but due to popular demand my Zazzle store is now public allowing everyone to purchase the same Lazydreads branded items that I buy, from the same place that I get them from. There are Zazzle websites in various locations around the world allowing you to get professionally printed items printed and shipped from a location that best for you.

www.zazzle.com/lazydreads

www.zazzle.co.uk/lazydreads

Post your Lazydreads T-shirt pictures onto instagram using the hashtag Lazydreads / #Lazydreads to be featured on my instagram page!

Travelling with dreadlocks

Ok! Today I'm talking about travelling with dreadlocks - what I take away with me when I'm away from home. My dreadlocks essentials!

75 month dreadlocks update

My dreadlocks are now 75 months old. 6 years and 3 months since I last had non-dreaded hair.

Lazydreads Vlog Week 3

"Lazydreads' Week" #3
This week I have a walk around the woods, explore the historic Sheffield general cemetery, pick up some essential oils, tour the room where I film most of my videos and give you an update on the lazydreads T-shirts.

Scented mist for dreadlocks

Ok, so one of the most annoying myths about dreadlocks is "you can't / don't wash dreadlocks"... the second most annoying myth is that they stink / smell bad. Dreadlocks will only smell bad if they're dirty.... same as with normal hair and pretty much the same as anything.. The thing is, dreadlocks don't really have a smell at all! Washing with a residue free shampoo or bicarbonate of soda will mean that they have no scent left behind in them after a wash, unlike normal hair which can be washed with scented shampoos and conditioners. To combat this and give your dreads a little bit of scented life you can create a simple spray from water and essential oils. I use the same oils that I use in my dreadlocks deep clean.

Personally I use a small spray-tube that was originally a sour candy spray. After a good wash you're left with a great sized mini spray that you can take around with you in your bag or purse etc. To my water I add 4-6 drops of whichever essential oil I've opted for. Personally I'm partial to lavender. Then I can spritz away and add a little scent to my other wise scentless dreads.

You can use whichever essential oil you like and little vials of essential oils can be found at your local health food store or some pharmacies. As a quick tip - Rosemary is good for dandruff, Tea Tree Oil is an antibacterial and antifungal and Peppermint can help if you need a little cooling behind the ears / neck.

The spray is NOT an alternative to washing dreadlocks and should not be used to cover up bad smells. If you have bad smelling dreads I would first recommend deep cleaning them and then making sure you don't have a residue or mildew problem.

Lazydreads Vlog Week 2

"Lazydreads' Week" #2

We pick up with me travelling home from Norway. There's a bit of behind the scenes from a Q&A and a little raw vegan cooking.

Dreadlocks Question and Answer #10

The 10th installment of my Q&A videos. 5 new questions ready to go:

Scales Yo
Question!!: I'm thinking about starting neglect dreads, do you have any specific advise for that method? I have soft straight hair and it's only about 6 inches long at its longest layer. Any advice would be lovely, thank you! Much love, xo

Ralf Florian
Question: I have afro growing hair, but im black and asian. This makes my hair have a weird texture (kinda soft but thick). I was wondering if this would play a role in sectioning.

angelsandfaes
QUESTION - what should I do for very dry dreads? I have done the deep cleanse and used apple cider vinegar. And it is soft only for that day. So my dreads are very dry and I'm worried about breakage.

Anu Kookla
QUESTION: What is the best way to get sand out of dreads? I went to the beach and now there is sand in my dreads and on my scalp.

Aaron95875
Question: what method of starting dreads is the best in your opinion backcomb, twist and rip or neglect and why? P.s thanks for the reply love your videos

Lazydreads Vlog

I'm starting a new Vlog called "Lazydreads' week" which (if there's any interest) will be uploaded each Monday and will just be clips of my previous week. There will be dreadlocks things and just random life things. Here is the first video:

Starting Dreadlocks

Click the link to be taken speedily to the appropriate page.

• Considering Starting Dreadlocks?
• How To Prepare For Dreadlocks
• How To Start Dreadlocks
• Hair length for dreadlocks
• Salon vs Homemade Dreadlocks
• Dreadlocks Sectioning And Dreadlock Thickness
• Sectioned vs unsectioned dreadlocks
• Partial Dreads Information
• Elastic / rubber bands
• Best time of year to start dreadlocks
• How dreadlocks can affect activities
• Dread wax info
• International Dreadmakers Directory 

Dreadlock Residue

Everyone runs the risk of getting residue in their locks. Residue occurs when a small amount of soap or shampoo is left behind after washing your locks. This can happen if you're not thorough enough with your rinsing or if your shampoo isn't designed to completely rinse out thoroughly - a non-residue free shampoo.

In this video I talk about what residue is, how it comes about, how to spot the signs of a residue problem and what negative effects you can get from having a residue problem:

In this second video I talk about how to remove residue and how to avoid future residue problems:

And here is a quick link to the Deep Clean video which can be used to break down and rinse out residue:

Lint, Dust and Fluff in Locks.

Ok, so the sight of anything alien, such as grey fluff in a lock is going to pretty scary, but rest assured it's nothing life threatening.

Lint, dust and fluff are everywhere. You can pick it up off of clothes, hats, towels, pillows.... you get the idea. It can sit on your locks just as easily as it can sit on any other surface. Then, just like on your clothes or other surfaces, the lint will easily wash off. Lint only becomes a problem when it's combined with a residue problem, in which case the lint won't just wash off, it can stick to the lock, building up inside the lock, in the tip or under a loop.

If you notice a grey deposit of fluff in or on your lock, do not fear, it can be very easy to overreact and worry, especially since the fluff can sometimes appear to be filling the whole inside of a dreadlock. Since lint is really just a visible symptom of residue you will deal with it in the same way with a deep clean. Deep cleaning will help to break down and remove the residue that the dust sticks to and then soaking and squeezing will help dislodge and remove the lint. If you have a particularly bad case it will take more than one deep clean. Little bits that are left over can be picked out with a needle if necessary.

You can help avoid general dust and lint by taking such measures as wrapping your locks when you sleep, using a microfibre towel for drying them and not laying on fabric surfaces while they're damp.




Residue Video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3i26lhsJJdM
Deep Clean Video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X782R85mFJE

Residue in Dreadlocks

Residue is quite a common occurrence in dreadlocks. If you use a non-residue free shampoo or use too much shampoo and don't rinse thoroughly enough you can quite quickly find that residue is left behind inside the dreadlock. This residue coats the hairs inside which makes the dreads less bendy and also makes it harder for other soap to pass through, so you get more and more building up.

Dreadlock residue becomes noticeable at the tips of the dreads. The residue runs downward inside the dreadlock with the water that runs out when you're washing your hair. The residue coats hairs at the tip of the dreadlock with a sort of sticky coating that causes dust/lint to stick to it. If you look at your dreadlock and carefully pull a tip apart just a fraction so you can see inside it and see that there's some grey fluff - don't worry, it's just lint held in with a bit of residue! Sometimes it's more easily noticeable as with really whispy tips you can get lint sticking to the outside of the dread.

I'll shortly be following this video up with info on removing the residue and how to try and avoid it in the future.

Question and Answer Part: 3

I've answered the next batch of Q&A questions!

New Q&A coming up!

I'm starting a new feature whereby I will personally answer your questions in my videos. If you have a question you'd like to ask about dreadlocks, my dreadlocks or me then leave your question in the comments section for my questions video! I'll answer all the questions! Remember to leave your name at the end of the comment if you would like me to read out who has sent in the question. As normal you can ask questions here, on twitter or on my other videos and I'll answer those ASAP, but the questions posted on the question video will only be answered once I make the answer video.

Thanks.

Dreadlock Tag

Me answering the dreadlock tag!

How Often Should You Wash Dreads?

New video where I talk about how often you should wash your dreads. We all know that dreadlocks need to be kept clean, despite what all the "dirty dread" myths have to say on the matter. I quite often get asked how often dreads should be washed, as some people say every other day, others say a couple of times a week and then some different people that say once a week... this causes a lot of confusion, especially since everyone is right!

Itchy dreadlocks?

Ah itchy dreadlocks, a problem that plagues many, well it's more of an itchy head than itchy dreads but I'm sure you get the idea. Itchy dreadlocks can be a real pain and it leads to lots of people cutting off the dreads all together! fear not, I am here to help!

What causes itchy dreadlocks?

There are a few factors that can attribute to an itchy head, but luckily most of them can be solved the same way.

Scalp Build Up:
Every time you wash your hair you are stripping away the oils from your scalp. The more frequently you wash, the more oils your scalp as to produce. So if you normally wash your head every day and then suddenly start to wash it once a week you're going to find that your head is still producing the same amount of oils that it used to and you're getting a really irritated scalp. You need these oils, it's a balance, if you have too much you get scalp build up (this build up occurs because dreadlocks aren't quite like normal hair, with normal hair a lot of this oils get all over your hair causing you to get greasy hair. You don't really get greasy dreads, instead it all stays on your scalp and become irritating.) If you have too few oils you'll get dry skin on your head and it'll get sore and equally as annoying. This is a common problem for people with new dreads, because you'll commonly go from washing every day with normal hair to only washing maybe a couple of times a week with the new dreads and so you get a really oily head. This is why I recommend slowly altering your washing schedule in order to minimize this problem and it's covered in my "Preparing For Dreadlocks" section. In order to fix this problem you just need to get into a new washing rhythm and stick to it. Decide how often you're going to wash the hair and then keep to it. If you decide you're going to wash every 3 days then after you've been doing this for a week or so your scalp will have gotten used to producing the level of oils required for this level of washing. This is why you can find that some people wash their dreads every couple of days and some people wash theirs once a week and neither have any problems - because their dreads are used to the frequency of the washing! If you want to quickly clean up your scalp you can use a bicarb soak to break down any oils that are building up on your scalp and then change to your new routine.

Dandruff:
This is another annoyance for those with dreads. Dandruff is when you have a dry scalp and it causes the skin to flake off and so you get little white flakes falling out of your hair and it can make the scalp itchy as they flake off. With normal hair you can fix this rather simply by buying some Head and Shoulders, unfortunately Head and Shoulders is not a residue free shampoo and therefore not recommended for dreadlocks. If you use H&S regularly with dreads you can quite quickly find that you get a sticky residue in the tips of the dreads and then lint will start sticking to the residue! To deal with dandruff I recommend a bicarbonate soak / dreadlock deep cleanse. You can either add some rosemary oil to a standard bicarb soak or you can soak your dreads and scalp in a rosemary tea. The rosemary will soothe the scalp and help prevent dandruff and the bicarb will remove any scalp build up you already have.

Shampoo Residue:
Not all shampoos work well with dreadlocks. If your shampoo leaves residue in your hair it can irritate your scalp. If you don't fully rinse out ALL the shampoo that you've used to wash your hair, it will remain in your dreadlocks. Dirt and lint can then stick to the residue and that can become irritating and unpleasant or the residue can dry out and flake off onto your head, drying out your scalp and again becoming irritating and unpleasant. To fix this problem I would recommend changing to a shampoo specifically designed to be residue free, I have a list of the ones I have had experience with in my "Washing and Dying" section. (Remember if you are using liquid doctor bronner's - the liquid needs to be diluted, the soap is very strong and thick straight out of the bottle and so I would recommend mixing it 1/10 with water before using it on your hair). You should then, once again use a bicarbonate soak / dreadlock deep cleanse - this will remove the soap residue that is stuck inside the dreadlocks and clean up your scalp allowing you to start fresh with your new soap. If you are already using a dreadlock soap / residue free shampoo and you are still getting build up I would recommend using less soap (I only use maybe 2 teaspoons of shampoo for my whole head) and spend longer concentrating on the rinsing out.

Other Causes:
There are other things that can cause dread itchy-ness and each case will be slightly different but the above are the most common and people with those problems often find it hard to pin point the cause. Other issues can arise when using other dreadlock "products" such as waxes, gels and other unnecessary dreadlock additives. Also over maintaining dreadlocks by trying to tighten the roots manually can cause tightness on the scalp and irritation. If you're having scalp problems I would recommend first dropping everything other than residue-free soap/shampoo and letting the maintenance regime relax.

Dreadlock sectioning and dreadlock thickness

The thickness of your dreadlocks will be heavily dependent on the size of the sections you make. Unless you're going with the neglect/natural/free-form method, then chances are you're going to need to section your head. Sectioning is when you square off your head into a chess board type arrangement. Often the sections will be held in place temporarily with elastics in order to keep the sections together, but these should be removed as soon as you're done. These square sections of hair will then be backcombed or twist and ripped to form the lumps of hair that go on to mature into the dreadlocks. Care should be taken when creating the sections as the sections are permanent, where ever you create a section, you will be creating a dreadlock, so take special care around the forehead, both for aesthetic reasons and also to make sure you don't create any that will pull too hard in sensitive areas.

Section shapes

Most commonly the sections will be squares. Squares are easy to create and easily to create consistently the same size. Another benefit to squares is that they won't pull too sharply in the corners of the section like for instance a triangle shaped section. Dreadlocks get heavier as they get older, longer or wet and so you really don't want sections with sharp corners where the weight can concentrate and while a square section obviously has corners it makes a fairly decent compromise between being fairly easy to create and not having too much weight concentrated on one single corner. I've seen sections like the surface of a soccer ball/football and this would go even further towards avoiding too much pull on one corner, but obviously it's a much harder section to create consistently and would require much more planning when working across a whole head.

Section sizes

I would say that the most common sizing for sections would be 1 inch by 1 inch squares and so a fully sectioned head could be seen as a chess board where each square is 1 inch high and 1 inch across. The size of the square determines how much hair will be in each dreadlock, a bigger square will result in more hair and therefore a thicker dreadlock.

Dreadlock sizes

Here is where the confusion arises, although two people could have their dreadlocks created by the same person, using the same method and the same section sizes, they could come out with very different looking dreadlocks and I'm not just talking about blonde vs brunette here. Hair thickness plays a very big role in determining how thick your dreadlocks are going to be. Obviously I'm not talking about the diameter of the individual hairs, but how thick the hair coverage is. Now I've never stopped to count hairs personally, lets say that one person has one thousand hairs growing out of a 1 inch by 1 inch section. Someone with thicker hair could have 2 thousand hairs growing out of the same sizes section and therefore their dreadlocks would be thicker from the same sized section! This leads to a lot of upset when someone aspires to a particular look or to have a particular style of dreadlocks but they just don't have the right hair for it. It can be seen quite easily when people compare the number of dreadlocks they have. I've seen people with as few as 10-12 dreadlocks and others with over 100! This can be quite upsetting for some, I remember one particular case where someone had an exact look in mind, they had a picture of a set of locks where there were many many thin dreadlocks, a whole head of thin even dreads. Unfortunately this person had very thin, fine hair and therefore their head would not actually be able to produce that many dreads, they would have to have quite large sections just to create fairly average sized dreads and therefore wouldn't be able to have a whole head with lots and lots of dreads.

Tightness vs Thickness misconception

There's a common misconception that if you create tighter dreads then you will create thicker dreads. By this I mean if you took two equal sized sections and backcombed one very tight and one not so tight, the tighter one would be shorter and fatter as it would be more compressed and the looser one would be longer and thinner. What will happen is as the dreadlocks begin to grow - you get new growth coming out, the new growth will be the size set by the section size. So both the tight dread and loose dread will have the same thickness of new dread growing from the root, regardless of how tight or fat you made the initial backcombed section. Over time the loose dread will tighten on it's own and shrink up when you wash it - see Shrinkage and the tight fat dread would either loosen up from washing or remain tight and fat, in which case you'd end up with club-like dreads, fat lumps on the ends with skinner dread bodies growing from the scalp.

All dreads will shrink up to some extent as they mature and each person's set will shrink a different amount so you shouldn't worry if yours haven't shrunk "enough". But once the dreads have been sectioned their thickness will have been dictated by the section size and your hair thickness, the only way to thicken the dreads after this would be to congo them - see Congo / Conjoined dreads. This is when two or more dreads grow together therefore increasing the size of the sections by two or more.