By Cassadie of Natural Selection
I’m a firm believe that in addition to knowing your curl pattern, you must know your strand thickness if you are to properly care for your curls. Here’s step one in figuring out where YOUR hair lies on the spectrum. If you’re interested in reading the full series where I discuss styling, products, and regimen for fine hair you can find all other posts here.
For the longest time, I thought that if you had thick hair, your hair was coarse and if you had thin hair then your hair was fine. Until about a year ago, I lived my entire life under the assumption that because my hair was extremely thick that it was coarse. However, after going natural I discovered that beneath my straightened hair, there were follicles waiting to release zillions of little slinkies from my scalp. One day my friend was inspecting my teeny weeny coils when she said “your coils are so dense, but your hairs themselves are so so fine.”
Up close and personal shot of my texture
“Fine hair?? On this head?? Not a chance”, I said laughing it off.
“No really,” she insisted. And with that, she plucked a hair from her scalp held it up to one of my own.
To my surprise her hair was double the thickness mine! After a few more comparisons with other heads, I discovered that without a doubt, I fall into category of having fine hair.
I shared with you my discovery of fine hair because many of us assume that because we have kinky coils or a thick head of hair that our hair is COARSE, when in reality you could be like me and have a thick head of fine hair.
Let’s break it down to see where you fall.
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Fine and thin (low density) hair. That is why length is my goal, because it gives a bit of an illusion of thickness.
Oh man, can somebody get this troll out of here “Beauty”, “Police”, “M”, “Goody too shoe”, “Kristy G” and whatever IT keeps changing its name too, leaving all those negative nasty comments, looking for attention (which incidentally i am now giving it!)
Can you imagine how miserable that persons life must be? They have nothing else to do but to stake out in some dark hole and cyber harass innocent people, who are all gorgeous as a matter of fact. That’s incredible.
+1000 :)
YES!!!!!!!!!!!! I hate when people use “coarse” as a synonym for kinky or coily hair. And don’t get me started on white women’s mags that have hair articles — with four categories, (a) straight, (b) wavy, (c) curly, and (d) “coarse” aka the hair black people have, whether relaxed or natural. (And as if we don’t fall into the other categories! ::eye roll::)
My hair is medium thickness and coarse but my daughters is fine and thin (but she’s only 2). its so hard to do her hair because i have to be so careful with it!
My hair is weird. The strands themselves are fine, medium, AND coarse. As far as density, I suppose my hair is medium. People call it thick, but that’s because my hair has always (even when relaxed) held a lot of body.
Hopefully this will keep that person at bay lol…. But yeah my hair is thick and coarse and I love it, because it will hold up alot of styles for me. Right now I just put in another set of mini-twists in last night, and thank god because my arms hurt.
To all the natural sister keep up the good work and ignore the jerk that is typing nasty stuff the best part of that person went in he mattress when they where conceived!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hello Ladies,
I’m so sorry about this comment troll! It is a woman or man using the same email address to post multiple comments under different names. I’ve deleted all the comments and will continue to watch this thread.
If the comments pop up again and I’m not getting to them fast enough please email me at blackgirllonghair@gmail.com
Leila
My hair is fine to medium strands, medium density and very porous. Protein and henna are my friends!
I’ve got fine hair, densely packed, and a big head. Haha a very temperamental combination :) But hey, it’s mine.
I will definitely appreciate reading this series!
So true I didn’t realize this until the hairstylist Ouidad told me that my hair was baby fine I just had lots and lots of it. She said most curly haired people do not have coarse hair at all, it’s actually very rare. Before this people would tell me I had coarse hair and I believed it even though when my hair would shed I would notice most of them were small in diameter and some of them were super small. I only have two friends with actual coarse hair. Smh I think a lot of the people who were describing my hair weren’t even talking about hair thickness they were just using coarse as a less insulting way to call my hair nappy.
My hair has mix of fine and course strands. But overall my hair medium. I have neither extra fine hair or extra coarse strands. My crown is the softest, my edges are more coarse. Here is view of my thickness:
