5 Year Dreadlock Journey

I recently brushed out my long dreadlocks and it was a hugely transformative experience for me. I had them almost 5 years, and it took almost that entire time for them to grow to the length I envisioned when I began. Back in 2015, I was in a completely different phase of my life than I am now. I was with my now-husband, Jade, we had been together about a year, both working, but besides that, we had little to no responsibilities. We went to music festivals and local shows on the weekends and we stayed home a lot, too. I had lots of friends with dreadlocks and I had wanted to have dreads of my own for several years. Now, in 2020, I’m married, about to be a mother of two, with way more responsibilities, fewer music festivals, lots of work and home remodeling and baby prep and just…more adulting.

When I started out, I had hair to the length of my mid back, and I wanted to have long dreads, so I decided not to brush my hair and see how it went. I did the natural or “neglect” method, which means you wash your hair often and skip the conditioner, and you don’t brush your hair. If your hair is clean and not slippery from oil buildup or conditioner, the hair will naturally tangle really well, and over time, form dreadlocks. The only thing you need to do is occasionally rip apart the dreads that are starting to form together, so you can have individual dreads instead of a few huge locks that have melded together.

The first few months of my journey

Getting some pretty waves before the tangles

I wanted them to be as “natural” as possible, so I didn’t roll them or twist them a ton like some people do. Looking back, I kind of wish I did so I could help my locks form longer and thinner, not shorter and chunkier. Jade kept offering to help me roll them out, but I said no thanks because I wanted them to be left to dread in their natural course. So that’s how I ended up with short, thick dreads after having long healthy hair.

I never knew that the awkward stage would be SO awkward. My hair got super fluffy and tangled and I felt like a cavewoman. I was happy to experience all the stages because they really showed me how temporary and superficial beauty is. I was at a good place in my life that I could look pretty awful but still feel beautiful, because I was confident and knew that beauty came from within. I did acknowledge that my hair was crazy and not “pretty,” but I persisted, knowing that I would eventually have the dreadlocks I wanted.

After 2 years of leaving my hair alone, I was about to have my first baby and I wanted to get my dreads touched up for my maternity photos. I went to a dreadlock specialist at a local salon, and she helped my dreadlocks solidify by pulling in loose hairs and joining them to existing dreads. My hair was super poofy and wild before, and while it still might have looked like that to the untrained eye, I could tell a huge difference in that I had way less loose hair, and my dreadlocks were looking more mature.

After getting cleaned up at the salon

Over the next couple years, I continued to use only approved shampoos to wash my dreads, and absolutely no other hair products. Most shampoos leave behind chemical residues that stay in your hair, but I found a good resource on which shampoos were good for dreadlocks because they didn’t leave behind this residue. You can find that list at http://ragingrootsstudio.com/shampoo-list/. I also started palm rolling my dreads when they were wet out of the shower to encourage them to form longer and more uniform.

One of the most annoying things about dreadlocks is washing & drying them. Contrary to widespread belief, you DO need to wash your dreads regularly, preferably about once a week. They require much more time, water, and shampoo to wash. When you are done washing, rinse well and when you’re getting out of the shower, you can even grab your locks in a big bunch and wring them out like a towel. SO much water gets released this way! This will help your dreads dry faster than otherwise. But still, my locks would take about 12 or more hours to dry thoroughly! So you never want to wash your dreads at night and sleep on wet dreads. In wetter climates like ours, this can lead to them never really drying out and even getting mold (yuck). I was always really careful to never wash at night and to let them dry out very thoroughly between washes. One of my techniques was to go outside with my wet dreads and whip my hair back and forth to fling as much water out as possible! Once your dreads get longer and heavier, you could actually injure your neck doing this haha.

Late 2018 after getting them worked on a 2nd time.

After about 4 years, in 2019 my dreads starting getting noticeably longer. They were almost to the length my hair was before starting. Finally! I really loved wearing them up in a giant bun. I actually rarely wore my dreads completely down, it was just too much hair! But with such long dreads, the maintenance took even longer. Washing was something I started to dislike even more. Going to bed, I would need to put my dreads above my head on my pillow so they were “out of the way” and I would scoot down on the bed to make room for them up there.

Something I did that helped them appear longer was brush out many of the blunt ends of the dreadlocks. Loosening the hair at the ends gave me some soft normal hair at the ends of my locks that I really liked the look and feel of. Another thing I enjoyed doing was using two dreadlocks to tie my hair back if I didn’t have a hair tie. Actually, none of my normal hair ties would fit over my giant bun anymore so I bought some amazing dreadlock hair elastics from https://mountaindreads.com/collections/dread-ties/products/stretchy-dread-ties.

Nothing like having a big voluminous dreadlock bun :)

In 2018-2019 I also had a couple other women work on cleaning up my dreadlocks and I was really happy with the end result. My dreads were finally looking like I always envisioned them and I enjoyed them for what they were. But with such long thick dreads, came so much extra work and they were by no means “low maintenance.” I wondered how much longer I would let them grow.

When I found out that I was pregnant in February of 2020, I shortly became super tired and sick for a couple of months. The nausea and exhaustion made me crave ease and simplicity and softness. My hair was none of those things, sadly. I was feeling the urge to have normal “easy” hair again, even though I knew I would miss my locks so much and I would probably never have dreadlocks again. So the question arose, should go through the huge time consuming experience of brushing them out, or should I just go the quick route of shaving my head?

I had spoken to a couple women with experience brushing out dreads. I found some youtube videos and tutorials that made it seem like it wasn’t THAT hard. I also knew some girls who had shaved their heads and looked amazing! But I was so nervous to go through with that because I knew the journey to grow it back out after a buzz cut would take a long time and could include many awkward stages. But on the plus side, shaving would be so quick and EASY, and I could be sleeping on my pillow that very night with no giant bundle of dreads in my way. It was super tempting and I came really close several times to having Jade shave my head and get it over with. But ultimately, I went the brushing route.

I knew to brush through almost 60 dreads would take a long time, but I didn’t realize it would take almost 8 weeks. It was a super daunting task, especially after brushing through the first few dreads took me hours. I had no comb sturdy enough to brush them without breaking in half, so I used the sturdiest tool I could think of: a fork. And it actually worked great! I found out quickly that coconut oil was not the best oil to use to detangle my dreads. It did not saturate my dreads enough, and if they weren’t really wet, the hair would break even more and I would lose almost all of my hair. I found that out after starting with a really long dread and ending up with about 6 inches of barely any hair.

So after that, I went out and bought a couple bottles of cheap drugstore conditioner, because I didn’t want to spend a lot and I knew I would be using up all the conditioner really quickly. The conditioner I used was Aussie 3 Minute Miracle & one other one that I can’t remember. I went through both big bottles during the brushing. I would get a bunch of conditioner in my palm and rub in up and down a dreadlock until the dread was wet and messy with conditioner. I always had a towel in my lap to catch any excess conditioner or broken hair, and I had a paper grocery bag by my feet to throw the broken clumps of hair into.

Each dreadlock took between 30 minutes and 1 hour or more, and I had almost 60 dreads. As the process went on, the more tempted I was to just shave my head and end it! I started out just doing a few dreads a day alone at my house, but when my mom and sister offered to help, I went over there and they helped me tackle up to 10 dreads in one sitting! We actually got blisters on our hands from holding the forks for so long.

The process of brushing my dreads out reminding me a lot of my experience with childbirth: long, uncomfortable, and I wanted to skip all the hard parts and just get to the end already. When I was about halfway done I took a couple weeks off because I just needed to forget about it. It was not fun! I also felt so sick from early pregnancy and couldn’t wait to have my short, easy, soft hair that I wanted so badly.

I bought this pet comb on amazon that had metal teeth and it seemed like the perfect tool for my dreads. It was a huge game changer! While the fork had only 4 tines, this pet brush had like 30 tiny teeth that ripped through my dreads so much better than the fork. It gave me that second wind of energy to finish up this huge endeavor. https://www.amazon.com/Detangling-Pet-Stainless-Removing-Tangles/dp/B077T1LQCV/ref=sr_1_38?dchild=1&keywords=metal+pet+brush&qid=1592671052&sr=8-38.

In mid May, my mom helped me get through about 12 dreads in one night, and the next day I brushed out my last 3 dreads alone at my house. The feeling of combing through that last dreadlock was incredible. It was the end of an era in my life. I had beautiful dreadlocks for 5 years, and then they were gone.

It was such a huge project that seemed unattainable when we first started out. And when I was finally done, I felt a huge figurative weight lifted off my shoulders. My dreadlocks were never actually that heavy, but emotionally they were weighing on me heavily. After they were all brushed out, some of my hair was down to my hip bones! But it was so thin and damaged, I needed to have most of it cut off so I could have healthy thick hair. I wanted to experience my pregnancy with a lightweight, shoulder length hairstyle that made me feel beautiful.

After that first, blissful shower when I could shampoo and condition my soft hair, I went back to my family’s house and my sister in law gave me a cute quarantine hair cut. It was amazing. When she was done, my mom blow dried my hair and let me use her straightener a little bit to smooth out my new hair style. I hadn’t had shoulder length hair in ten years so I hardly recognized the woman in the mirror. But I loved what I saw!

I haven’t regretted undergoing this huge transformation, not once. I love having soft, low maintenance hair, it’s exactly what I wanted. When I saw these photos I had taken back in early March, before I started brushing, I can’t help but appreciate the beautiful dreadlocks I had, all the time it took to let them grow, all the love I poured into them, and all that they taught me about beauty. Nothing can define beauty except for you. Beauty comes from within and no appearance or hairstyle can take it away.