Length retention: 8 habits to keep your coily hair long

Every morning, the same small handful of short hairs at the bottom of the sink. You rinse it away without thinking. Yet laid end to end over a year, it adds up to several centimetres that will never reach your ends.

How fast your hair grows isn't something you can control, and no treatment changes it. What you can control are the habits that let the fibre reach the end of its length in one piece. There are eight of them, split between wash day and the rest of the week, and none of them asks you to buy a single product beyond the ones you already have. To keep the full sequence to hand, our step-by-step tutorial walks you through the six steps of the Rituel Texture®.

What “retaining” means

Two different things stop you from seeing your length, and it helps to tell them apart before changing anything. The first is shrinkage: a coily fibre coils up on itself as it dries, and hair that reached down your back in the shower springs back up to shoulder height an hour later. Nothing is lost, it's all folded up. The second is breakage, and that one really costs you. Hair grows normally at the root, snaps along the way, and the result doesn't budge from one year to the next.

We've covered both mechanisms, the four moments when breakage happens and the research that documents them in can coily hair grow long. What the coily fibre does and why it's built this way is explained in why do we have coily hair. This article picks up from there: it deals with the habits, one by one.

One marker before you start, because it stops you from treating the wrong problem. A hair that has shed naturally has a small, paler bulb at its tip. A broken hair doesn't: it's a fragment. If your comb mostly brings out fragments, the eight habits that follow are for you.

Habit 1Detangling in the right order

This is where most is won or lost, often in a matter of minutes. A stubborn idea says that dry detangling is forbidden on coily hair. It has done a lot of damage, because it blames the wrong culprit. What breaks hair isn't dry fibre: it's a comb dragged through dry, bare hair, forcing every knot instead of undoing it.

So the Rituel Texture® starts dry, with the fingers, and with no tools. This is Chadian finger detangling. You work in at least six sections, never more than eight, holding the root with one hand while the thumb of the other smooths the strand, one small strand at a time. Your fingers meet the knot before pulling on it, and decide to stop. Each finished section is closed into a loose twist, which keeps the work in place until you reach the basin.

The tool only comes in much later, on hair coated in mask, from ends to roots, without forcing. The Man Dol' Comb is cut from buffalo horn sourced from the food industry, upcycled and worked by hand in Vietnam; its teeth are wider than those of the combs of the past, precisely because the old ones hurt. How to handle it is explained in detangling without breakage.

If breakage is already significant, this detangling becomes delicate and is best left to a trained hairdresser rather than improvised on a Sunday evening.

Habit 2Ten minutes of mask, every routine

A supple fibre bends where a rigid one snaps. The Repairing Mask does nothing else, and that's a lot. Warm it between your palms, apply it section by section from ends to roots, and leave it on for ten minutes, under a shower cap if you can. The ends are the oldest part of your hair: they get the treatment first and in the largest amount.

Ten minutes, no more. The longer times you'll see quoted, thirty minutes, an hour, a whole night, date from a time when formulas did little and people made up for it with patience. A mask left on overnight adds nothing, and the night has better things to do.

Nor is this time simply spent waiting. It's while it runs, mask in place, that The Man Dol' Comb does its pass. A full routine where you rinse before detangling with the comb loses half its value.

Habit 3Locking in moisture without oil

This is the step most often skipped, and the one that decides whether the work of the previous steps lasts seven days or two. Moisture went in during washing; now it has to stay. The Styling Cream helps hold it in, applied generously to the lengths, followed by a last pass of The Man Dol' Comb and then a braid or protective twists.

Old advice said to finish with an oil or a butter. That's no longer what we recommend. An oil contains no water and moisturises nothing; layered over a poorly hydrated fibre, it mainly seals in the lack. Between two routines, a drop of light oil on the ends can top up if they feel tight, and nothing more. The difference between the three product families is covered in styling cream, leave-in or gel.

The oil bath comes from the same misunderstanding. It has its place, once or twice a year at most, and no more. To prepare for a wash, finger detangling is more than enough.

Habit 4Drying decisively rather than lukewarm

For a long time, the advice was to limit heat on coily hair, as an unconditional rule. Salon experience says otherwise: a short, decisive drying, always on the move, treats the fibre better than lukewarm heat kept up for hours, and above all better than lengths left damp and heavy for half a day.

The sequence matters more than the temperature. The Styling Cream goes on first, on damp hair, along the full length: it protects the fibre from the heat to come. Then comes the hairdryer, small strand by small strand, from roots to ends, with a bouncing motion, never lingering on one area. No brush. The end is held between thumb and forefinger and dried last, very lightly.

Between two routines, when you barely rewet your hair, air drying is perfectly fine. The diffuser often comes up in online advice: on coily hair it only helps in rare cases, and we don't present it as the tool for this step.

Habit 5Spending your nights on silk

It's the only one of the eight habits that works while you do nothing, and it's also the easiest to set up. Cotton absorbs moisture and snags the fibre; silk does the opposite. Ghana prefers a silk scarf, with a silk pillowcase, to a bonnet.

How you set it up matters as much as the material. Take down the day's style, apply a little Styling Cream with extra on the ends, only run the comb through if your hair is genuinely tangled, then make six braids twisted on themselves, never tight at the root, secured with a silk scrunchie or tucked under the scarf. Lengths that are tidied away no longer rub against anything. Our night-time hairstyles give variations depending on length.

Habit 6Touching your hair less often

Every time you handle your hair there's a cost, tiny, and it adds up. Styles that keep your lengths tucked away for several days, twists, cornrows, buns done without gel, mechanically reduce that cost. That's their real benefit: they don't make hair grow, they stop you losing it.

They still have to stay protective, and that's where a lot of hair has been damaged. Too much tension doesn't just pull on the fibre, it pulls on the follicle, and the front hairline is the first to give way. This is the mechanism behind traction alopecia, observed in women and teenage girls who repeatedly wear braids, cornrows or weaves (Khumalo et al., Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, 2008). As long as it's only irritation, everything grows back. When the area has been thin for months, regrowth is no longer guaranteed.

The question of how long always comes up, and it can't be answered in weeks. A style stays in as long as three conditions hold, and comes out as soon as one of them gives.

Alternating styles also avoids always putting the same tension on the same places. The signs of a style that's doing damage are covered in the signs a protective style is damaging your hair.

Habit 7Trimming damaged ends

This is the most counter-intuitive habit on the list, and the one people put off for reasons that seem good. A split fibre doesn't close up again: the split travels upwards and damages hair that was perfectly fine along the way. So not cutting costs you more length than cutting.

Allow eight to twelve weeks between trims, taking off only the damaged ends, and do it on dry, stretched hair: otherwise shrinkage makes any assessment misleading. Timing, signs to watch for and how it goes in the salon are covered in when to cut coily hair, and how to look after your ends between cuts in protecting your ends.

Habit 8What happens at the table

What comes out of the follicle also depends on what arrives on your plate. It's the slowest of the eight habits, the one where you see nothing for several months, and it doesn't replace any of the other seven: a flawless diet will never make up for a comb dragged dry through knots. Our guide to foods that support hair growth sets out the main food groups to keep an eye on.

A word on supplements, since they often promise what habits achieve. They can help in case of a deficiency, but that has to be confirmed, not guessed, and a pharmacist's advice is worth more than an advert. No supplement makes healthy hair grow faster.

Consistency over intensity

The eight habits aren't equally difficult, but they are equally a matter of consistency: it's repetition that makes them work, not intensity one Sunday in three. A full routine every seven to ten days, carried through to the end, does more than three improvised treatments in the same month.

Finally, stop judging by the mirror. Shrinkage hides progress as much as breakage does. Always take the same strand, in the same place, stretch it wet along a ruler, write down the number, and do it again three months later. In the meantime, other signs tell you what's coming: fewer fragments in the comb, ends that stay supple from one routine to the next, detangling that has gone quiet. Once those three things are in place, the length follows, because it stops being lost again.

Frequently asked questions

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Sources

• Khumalo N. P. et al., “Determinants of marginal traction alopecia in African girls and women”, Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, 2008.
• “Alopecia”, MSD Manual, Professional Version, dermatology section: traction alopecia and reversibility depending on how long it has been present.