Beautiful hair ladies, all of you. My question is--how long from start to finish on wash day are you spending doing your hair? One hour? Two hours? In between washing (on non wash days), do you detangle at all to cut down on matting? When my hair was BSL stretched natural it would take me about an hour or more to detangle on wash day, and if I wouldn't detangle at least every other day (which took about 1/2 hour) it would be a mess. It's one of the reasons I didn't want to grow any longer because it was just too much work to have that much hair (for me).
I am on a journey to attempt to grow it out once again, but the minute it starts taking over 30 mins for me to style and detangle my hair, then it's over.
I know what you mean. For some time I've struggled with the detangling issue. It started to take so long to detangle my hair. I used A LOT of water. I didn't feel right about it, but it REALLY hit home when I moved to a new place that doesn't have the same hot water capacity. I could never get my hair detangled before the hot water ran out. It was and still does take me 30-40 minutes to detangle. It can be much less if I do it daily, but that isn't always practical.
I mentioned above that I found that banding makes a big difference. I can wash my hair, band it and then when it dries, I can take out the bands and brush it. It doesn't go huge east-west style like it would if I brushed it ordinarily. And I can put it up in a bun and brush it gently once a day, dry, with virtually no tangling problems at all.
That being said, my hair takes a long time to dry when banded. It can take two days, depending on the weather. And I think folks would stare at me if I went out with my hair like that. I have a picture of what it looks like in my fotki. I did once gather back the sections in to a ponytail so that I could go to the doctor. But I know I saw people looking kinda funny, since I had about 30 scrunchies in my hair.
So, in general, if I wash and let it air dry loose (which is what I do most of the time) it will take a long time to detangle when it's that time again, even though I almost always wear my hair in a bun. The only solution I have come up with besides banding is, like I mentioned, to cowash and detangle daily. I did this for over two years. I might go back to it again, since I finally have the time. But I'll be in school next August and I'll have to rely heavily on banding my hair.