Your Hair Type & Routines?

Oh, hair surveys, I love these!

~My hair is naturally very straight. I've never had a problem with wavy hair before, but right after it dries, it likes to rub against eachother to cause "poofy" hair. And thus, I will put my blow dryer on ONLY cold shot to smooth down my hair (especially the top layer). It also waves/curls very easily when I request for it to. Yay!

~According to the average Asian, my hair is medium. However, when taking into account of the people out there with baby fine hair, I know that my hair is definately what you call coarse.

~Although the hair itself is quite thick and I also have a LOT of hair, my hair is staright enough so that when I lightly measure the circumference, it will seem small, but when I apply pressure to my hair strands, it will still be relatively thick even when compared to curly heads out there.

~The chemicals I've used in my hair? Well, last year, regrettably, I colored my hair A LOT. It was around once every 3 months. I dyed my hair red in August, touch-up (all over) in November, Another touch up (all over) in Febuary, brown with highlights in late March, I colored it all over with blue-black (my natural color) in late April (sadly, it ended up a different shade of black than my own, and looked dreadfully horrid), applied red highlights in May, and then attempted for red hair again in early June, but when that failed, I gave up on my hair's natural color. I don't think I'll bother trying the color bottles for a long time because of all the damage I caused.

My routine!

So far, the best luck I've ever had with a conditioner would have to be, hands down, Garnier Frutis. However, for the last 8 months, I have stayed away from Garnier, in hopes of finding a different conditioner that will be just as good, if not better than that green bottle of miracle.

I wash my hair, on average, every 3-4 days. I work on Sunday at a restaurant, so I have no choice but to wash it on Sunday night, and then I will usually wash it on Wednesday or Thursday too. The day before I wash it, I may rag curl it with a mixture of jojoba and coconut oil (which works splendidly for shiney curls, but I recommend that you don't let anyone touch your hair, because it will feel so greasy; at least it does with the amount I put on).

With the way my hair is, I have no choice but to apply conditioner to my entire head of hair. And thus, my wash and groom routine goes in 2 different variations. On Sunday's washing, I will wet down my hair first. Then, I will put VO5 Kiwi Lime on the lower half of my hair. After that, I will either use a diluted mixture of 50/50 shampoo and water, or I will use my Suave Kid's shampoo (Mmm.. the watermelon smells like Jelly Ranchers), or I will use some undiluted Aussie Moisture Shampoo (but I only use this once a month or so, depending on how long it's been since I've gone without the full strength of shampoo). Anyways, I will put the shampoo on the upper half on my hair, starting at my crown and the front of my scalp. After my scalp is thoroughly clean (in my opinion at least), I will rinse out everything in my hair. On the Wednesday/Thursday wash, I will do everything the same, except I leave out the shampoo, and I just CO with VO5.

After the rinsing, I will thoroughly apply my "heavy" conditioner on the lower half of my hair. This tends to be the Aussie 3 Minute Miracle or Garnier Frutis (before I went in search of something else). Since my hair sucks up conditioner, I like to apply some more VO5 to the top half of my hair to keep it nice and shiny too. I usually like to give 10 minutes for all of that conditioner to sink in. The last thing I will do before I hop out of the shower is to rinse out all of the conditioner from my hair, and then I will turn on the cold water, and apply a cold water rinse.

After blotting my hair with a towel, I like to apply this Aqualust Lusterizer cream to my hair. It really helps to detangle my hair, and make it feel beyond soft--truly a great find. I recommend this to any one with coarse hair; you can buy it at Sallys. Anyways, then I will detangle with a wide-tooth comb, create my part, and wait for my hair to dry. Once it hits the "not wet, just a little bit damp still" mark, I will either apply some jojoba oil, or coconut oil, or Redken Anti-Snap. Just a smidge of whatever product I feel like using at the time. Then I will detangle once more with my wide-tooth comb, and let it finish drying. After it finished drying, I like to check to see if my hair looks good or bad. If it does look bad, I apply a tad more of the Aqualust cream, and it's an instant fix!

The only huge problem I face is the split ends on the long long hairs that stem from the nape of my neck. The ends are almost always split (and not the normal splits either. It's the 3 or 4 splits in strand kind). I also face this problem with the front of my top lays, but it's not nearly as bad as the splits I find around my nape.

Oh goodness, this was a long post. Well, it just shows what happens when you have extra time on your hands.