Black Hair Care Questions & Tips

There have been several attempts to define hair “type”. You may ask “Why should I care?” Well, mostly you shouldn’t. But, knowing your hair type can allow you talk with others and research products, styles and regimens that are best for your particular hair. There are controversies surrounding hair type methodologies that use works like kinky, nappy and other words that have less than positive connotations for some people. Other systems use numbers. But, they tend to lump all African American hair into one big category with a few variations. So, how useful is that really? Considering everyone’s hair is slightly different and people can even have different types of hair on their head at one time, categorizing hair is a difficult proposition at best.There are two major systems that seem to be the most popular. There is a system called LOIS that uses the hair shape as the defining hair “type”. For more on LOIS, do a Google on “LOIS Hair Type”. Until many people switch over to the LOIS system, there is the numbering system by Andre Walker. This system is kind of the standard. Frankly, we don’t put a lot of stock into these hair typing systems. They are far from “scientific” or definitive, relying on subjective judgments and just as much as you would be using if you didn’t have a “system”.