About texture changing when you don't comb. I don't know if my texture changes or it's just that manipulation makes the natural texture less obvious. Which is why I keep telling 4B folks that your hair has a curl pattern. Indeed, because I don't brush or comb my hair much, may be why mine seems more evident. As I showed in a previous experiment, if I WNG a small section of my hair, the definition of the coils/pen springs is very evident, but because the curls are so small, it isn't something I'd do all the time. I do comb my hair when wearing it out...but that's once in a blue moon, so I don't know if you'd consider that enough manipulation to disguise the texture. I still see the coils in the tightly curled hair even after combing. Maybe I wouldn't if I did it more often? Interesting thought BubblingBrownSuga.
Nonie, you know I have to disagree with you on this one. Actually, I have a bit of experience with washing and not combing my
entire head, like doing wash and gos 3 days in a row, or doing braided roots wash and gos for 2+ weeks, without having combed my hair for 2 weeks before that. So I know that, even multiple cowashes, even soaked in conditioner or with a curling product, and even with no product, my hair does not make pen spring coils from root to tip. I won't say that all 4b hair doesn't, but I know that mine doesn't. What it can do, however, is make those coils on the ends of the hair. That is what happens when I don't comb. The more I don't comb, the more of the hair that will eventually make it into these pen springs, but it maxes out at 50% on some parts, around 25% on other parts.
There are a couple reasons I think curl clumping might not make it all the way to the root (in addition to the combing). The first is that there are actually fewer and fewer hairs as one moves towards the ends of the hair, only the oldest hair in fact. So the density decreases as one moves away from the scalp. I think the denser the hair is for these tiny curl/kinks, the more strands there are, the more they interfere with each other in terms of clumping. I have a sneaking suspicion that if I had, say, only 60% of the follicles that I have now, my hair would clump more. I think this is why you had better success trying to get only a few strands to clump together. Pictures of your hair when more strands are involved didn't clump in pen springs as far as I could tell. The other reason is that the ends of most types of curly hair tend to be curlier than the center. I think this may have something to do with the ends not having additional hair weighing on them. I know it's not to do with manipulation and what not, because when I cut my hair last time (2-5") the new ends (what was once the middle of the strand) coiled up just like the old ends did. So the key is just getting the hair to be at the end of the strand, if you see what I mean. And then there's also the issue of the perfect coil vs. the z-bend + regular coil, but we talked about this a lot in another topic.