We’ll be hosting live trainings in the months of July and August on the following hairstyles for members of our amazing community, Mixed Kids Corner. Our group has currently emerged in the “Learn to Braid” challenge and there have been so many amazing milestones reached. Now it’s time to get fancy and have fun with some add-ons.

Fun with colored Hair Extensions

What a great way to spice up the summer! Adding coloring hairpieces is a great way to add color, but hair extensions are also a wonderful protective style. Did you know the hair extension actually protects curly hair when it’s used to braid over box braids and smaller 3-strand braids? It’s really amazing how much more my daughter’s curls retain moisture when I use extensions. There’s also so much less breakage, damage, and fly-aways when using hair extensions.

You definitely have options when it comes to purchasing hair. There are extensions with clips (which can be easily hidden under hair) or choose the extensions that get braided into the hair so there’s no worrying about hiding the clip. Then there are clip-in braids – so simple to add flair to a style!

Here are some of the products we will be using in our upcoming training:

• When developing a schedule, keep in mind:
  • what style and products you want to use
  • time (how long to do that particular style)
  • events (birthdays, holidays, or family photos)
  • weather: humidity, the weather will create frizz; makes straight hair go curly
  • give curly hair breaks from manipulation and tension

• Daily:
  • Refresh Curls with Water (Mister Spray bottle is the best!) and a leave-in Conditioner
  • Wear a Satin Bonnet to bed

• Weekly:
  • Main Wash Day
    • Wash Curly Hair with a cleanser once a week (Sunday)
      • Focus on washing the scalp and removing build-up
      • *Make sure cleanser is a sulfate-free shampoo
    • Condition Hair
      • Use a rinse-out conditioner. Be sure to section hair to be able to reach all strands
      • *Make sure conditioner is silicone-free
    • Leave-In Conditioner: apply on wet/damp hair
    • Detangle curls while wet with a conditioner or detangler
    • Style: Braids, ponytails, twists, bantu knots, etc.
      • * If tangles and dryness are an issue, do not wear curls down often.
  • Mid-Week Wash
    • If needed and not already in a protective style;
    • Wash Curly Hair with a Co-Wash mid-week (Wednesday)

• Bi-Weekly
  • Do a Deep Conditioning Treatment
    • Leave deep conditioning mask in for 15-20 mins with a plastic cap; rinse out

• Monthly:
  • Wash Curly Hair with a Clarifying Shampoo
    • Removes all of the product build-up
    • If your clarifying shampoo contains sulfate, you must add lots of extra moisture afterward (leave-in conditioner, deep conditioning treatment, etc)
• 4-6 Months:
  • Trim dead ends. This can be a full-out cut, or “dusting” to snip off the split ends. DIY cuts are better than no cuts at all! Try to do box braids and then snip off the ends with these scissors.

Style Regimen:

• Alter between styles each week.  Using a variety of styles will help protect hair, allowing it to grow healthy and prevent breakage. Here’s an example:
  • Week 1: Box Braids (depending on the size, this can last 2-3 weeks.
    • When removed, the scalp needs to rest at least a week before putting in more braids.
  • Week 2: Refresh box braids with moisture (spray water and leave-in conditioner); oil the scalp as needed
  • Week 3: Wash and Go for 1 day; followed by Braided Pigtails or Space Buns
  • Week 4: Cornrows (should last about 2 weeks)
  • Week 5: Refresh Cornrows (braids should be re-moisturized every 1-2 days with water and a leave-in conditioner) Scalp should be oiled as needed.
  • Week 6: Wash and Go for 1 day; followed by a Rubberband Style for the remainder of the week. 
    • When removed, do not use rubber bands in the same spots for another week or two to prevent breakage/tension in the same area.
  • Wash and Go
    • Leaving curls down will lead to dryness and tangles.  If you choose to leave hair down, only do so for a day or two. You know your child’s hair best. If leaving it down is not an option due to tangles, skip leaving it out.

• Silicones and Sulfates are not good for Curly Hair.
  • If you use a silicone product, it blocks moisture from getting into the hair strands.
  • If you use a silicone, you must use a sulfate to remove the silicone.  Sulfates are extremely drying, so this must be followed by a deep conditioning treatment.

We hope this advice helps you on your child’s curly hair journey. If you need further tips and advice, please subscribe to our newsletter:

Feel free to visit our SHOP page for other recommendations.

Tip number one. Use the finger detangling method. All you have to do, if you don’t know what it is, is use your fingers to pull out all the tangles and get through all the knots in the hair. The finger detangling method is the least expensive. In fact, it’s free-

Tip number two, start at the ends of the hair. If you start at the top, all you’re doing is dragging more and more tangles all the way to the bottom. That is not the right way to do it, and if you’re doing a kid’s hair, it’s going to be a hot mess.

Tip number three, leave-ins. Okay guys, we have to use our leave-in conditioner. We’ve got the leave-in spray here by Carol’s Daughter. This stuff smells so good, and then we also have the hair milk. This stuff is thicker and it’s really what you need to get that hair with a nice slip in it.

Just spray in your leave-in conditioner before you start detangling. This is going to create a great slip to be able to work through those tangles and get that hot mess out their hair. They’ve got so many different leave-in conditioners. You can use a leave-in spray and I’ll leave a few in the description below so you can check them out. Good, good stuff, but there’s also things to look out for. No silicone, no sulfate, no parabens and no mineral oil.

After you spray the leave-in conditioner, you can get started right away. Just go ahead and start detangling those curls. And it’s going to be a breeze once you have the right formula for your biracial curly hair. So we’ve got tip number one, the finger detangling method. Tip number two, start at the ends of the hair. Tip number three, spray that leave-in conditioner.

And tip number four, use a wide tooth comb. When you use a wide tooth comb, it’s almost like the finger detangling method. But second best, if you’re not using your fingers, start with a wide tooth comb.

Don’t start with a brush pulling all these tangles into one another. It’s just going to be a hot mess. So start with the wide tooth comb. Why don’t I have one here? Let me get a wide tooth comb. Guys, wide tooth comb right here. This comes in a four pack. It’s got two brushes and two coasts in the set. I’m going to leave a link in the description below, that way you can check out these products. But this is just so you want to start with this, don’t start with your brush. Start with a wide tooth comb that’s going to actually get through the curls. This is where it’s at.

Okay guys, we are onto tip number five. Water. Key ingredient here. Although it’s the last thing I’m mentioning on your five tips, it is actually your number one most important ingredient to detangling your hair. I love this spray bottle. This spray bottle is so amazing. Just look, this is step one to doing anything with curly hair. No matter if you’re detangling, if you’re styling, if you’re shampooing. Guess what? You have to apply water first.

So I hope you enjoy this tutorial that I’m going to show you how to do a Dutch French Braid. Make sure you let me know in the comments what you think. So before doing the French Braid, especially if you have frizzy hair, you want to tame the edges by adding some kind of edging gel. If you plan on laying the edges, you can do that too. You can do that at the end. But if you plan on keeping this hair style in for a couple days, add some kind of gel in your hair. That way when it hardens, it’ll keep all the hair flyaways down and that will allow you to keep your hair style in much longer than just a day or two.

Okay, so step two, you want to brush the child’s hair straight back. Now if you’re doing a single braid, you’ll just brush straight down the middle. Today we’re doing two Dutch Braids, so I actually am going to tie one side off and we’re going to work on one side at a time. So, imagine a diagonal line going from the corner of one side of the head all the way back to the bottom of that same side of the head. And that’s going to be how you want to brush the hair. You want to brush the hair in that line straight back.

Now, once you add the edging gel, then you can use a boar brush, brush the hair towards that straight line that you just created, then it’s kind of in the pattern that you want it to be in when you start braiding. So starting from the top, you just want to make like a triangle. You’ve got the hair parted, which I’ll show you in the video here. You just want to grab a triangle of hair and that’s going to be how we’re going to start the braid.

So once you have that section, you can split it into three equal parts and start a braid. Now again, I’m doing a Dutch French Braid, which means I’m going to be turning the strands under the next strands. There’s three strands, and once you’re holding them, the outside strand will twist under the center strand. Now that outside strand has become the center strand and that center strand has become the outside strand. And then you go to the opposite side, and you take that strand and tuck it under the center strand. Yeah, it makes no sense when I’m like walking through it, talking about it, pictures are worth a million words.

So for this tutorial, we’re going to start the braid from the right side. So you’ll grab that right strand of hair and you’ll twist it under the center part of the hair. But if you choose to start with the left hair, or depending on how the hair is falling you might want to start with the left. Also, when I start, I’ll do like a couple of braids. So it doesn’t really matter which strands you’re starting with, whatever’s most comfortable for you, that’s the strand you want to start with.

So in order to get a French Braid started, you want to do a few swipes of the braid. I do maybe three of them, and that kind of anchors it down so your starting point won’t become loose. Even if it does come loose, you still have a couple braids in that. It’s okay because you’ve put extra into that braid. So once you’ve had the braid started and you’ve got those three strands criss-crossed a few times, then you can start grabbing hair from the outside part and adding it in.

So if we start from the right side, you want to grab some hair at the top of that side, right behind that initial triangle. You’ll start, grab half an inch and add it. And it really just depends how thick you want your braid, that’s how much hair you’ll grab. So you can play with it. If you want a bigger braid, just know with curly hair, it’s probably going to be a looser braid. With curly hair, you want to do smaller sections that you add in, that way it’s a pretty tight braid that will last longer. The more curly your hair is, the harder it will be for your hair to stay in that hairstyle.

We did lay the edging to help minimize how much we’d have to smooth out, but you still probably will have to do some smoothing, so as you’re adding that hair to the right-hand side, you can use your fingers to add it in and straighten out all the bumps, or you can get a brush and just brush it in. It really depends on what your preference is and what works best for you. I like to use my fingers just because I can feel the knots and tangles as I go, but sometimes I’ll throw in a boars brush, just to really get that hair straight and smooth.

All right, so now that you’ve added hair to that strand, it is a much thicker strand and they will get thicker as we move along down the back of the head because you’re adding more and more hair as you go. Once you’ve added the right-hand side of the hair, go ahead and twist it under that center strand, and now you can start from the left side and you’re going to do the exact same thing. You’re going to add some hair to the left strand, twist it under the new center, the last strand that doesn’t have hair added to it yet, that’s your final strand is now on the right. You’re going to add some hair and twist it under again. And you just continue this process adding hair from each side, working your way down.

Don’t worry if you’re using a lot of hair or a little bit of hair, depending on how much you’re adding in, just keep it consistent throughout the process. You don’t want to add a big two inch strand on this side, but only a half an inch strand on that side. That’s just going to make it look lopsided. So just make sure if you’re using a half inch, do the same thing on the other side, and also do the same thing on the opposite side of the head. You want to keep it consistent.

So to finish off the braid, I like to keep the last few strands of hair coming from the head at the very end, I am going to use those to really tie it in close to the head. And then, from there you just continue with a regular standard braid. If you’re doing the Dutch French Braid, continue braiding those last three strands, you should have already added all of your side hair by now. Now we’re just doing a standard braid, so you’re either, if you’re doing inverted, you’re going to go under, if you’re doing a regular braid, then you’re braiding over with.

So once you do one side, repeat it on the other side. Again, it’s going to get easier. A lot of times my first side will look crazy, but by the second side it’s perfect. So if you need to go back and redo the other side, just keep practicing because practice makes perfect. So if you have long hair, unlike me, you can practice on yourself. Then the process would just become more quicker for you. You could get it done. Also, practice at night for protective hairstyles when you’re going to sleep, or your children are going to sleep you can do a protective hairstyle via a French Braid. I think that would be a great idea and a great time to practice.

So this might really look hard to start, but I promise it will get easier, and as you continue to do it, it’s just going to get faster and faster and faster. So there’s so many different ways that you can style if you have Dutch Braids, and you can have a different look every day. You can do like a bun style and just wrap the strands together. You could even combine the two braids and just stop at the neck line, put a ponytail in and you could have just a loose ponytail at the end. That’s another style that you could do. And you can get creative with it, and add cute little accessories and do different stuff with it. So it’s actually a lot of fun too.

At least, I hope this video was helpful for you. Let me know in the comments what you want to see next. If you have any tips for our curly hair community, also post those in the comments below, that way we can all help to evolve and build together. Every Thursday I’ll be posting new videos. I also plan on doing a two minute Tuesday where we’ll show you tips, tricks, tutorials, and even two minute hairstyles. Yes, hairstyles that will only take you two minutes. Yeah, I’m challenging my own self to these two minute hairstyles because with four kids I got to get them out the door in the morning.

So two minute hairstyle. Let me know what ideas you guys have for a two minute hairstyle. What you think can be done in two minutes. I’d love to hear that below. That way, when we kick off our two minute Tuesdays, we can start rolling some of those out. So I’m really excited about that. Make sure you subscribe and click on that bell, that way you’ll be notified for our next video. Thanks a lot. Love you guys. Bye-bye.