Starting Your Natural Hair Journey: Step-by-Step Guide
Embracing your natural hair is a journey of self-discovery and empowerment. It's about learning to love your hair in its most authentic form and understanding how to care for it. This guide is crafted to help you navigate the exciting path of embracing your natural hair, ensuring a smooth and rewarding transition.
Read more about the rise of the Natural Hair Journey by Compar, a modern and more inclusive version of the Curly Girl Method.
1 Understand Your Hair
Step one is to get to know your hair even better… In order to care and style for your hair, it's crucial to understand the features of your hair. Specifically your hair type, porosity, width, density, and scalp type. Each feature has its unique characteristics and care requirements.
Check out our ultimate guides to the different features including how to identify them.
Hair Type
Hair Porosity
Hair Width
Hair Density
Scalp Type
2 Avoid Damaging Ingredients
The key part of following NHJ is really to avoid ingredients that damage and dry out your hair. That is sulfates and drying alcohols, which you will find in most hair products. When you remove sulfates from your hair routine, you need to avoid silicones and waxes too, as these only can be removed from your hair with sulfates. If not removed, they will build up on your hair making it frizzy and sticky, and block moisture from penetrating your hair.
To summarize, from now on you need to avoid sulfates, drying alcohols, silicones, and waxes.
3 Find The Right Products
Now that you understand your hair better and know what ingredients to avoid, you can be more mindful when choosing products for your hair. However, even with all this information, we know that it can be difficult to find the right products for your hair…
Don’t you worry! Our Compar App gathers all you need for hair care guidance in one single platform including a constantly growing product database with exclusive match scores, indicating how much each product matches your unique hair.
4 Last Wash
Before you begin your NHJ with the new hair products specifically for your hair, you must perform a “last wash” with a shampoo containing sulfates, preferably sodium laureth sulfate, to remove any silicone or wax from your previous hair products. Make sure the shampoo does not contain silicones and waxes.
Popular and affordable options for last-wash shampoos:
Respons Avocado Oil & Shea Butter Shampoo - 32.95DKK / 4.42€
Fructis Hair Food Cocoa Butter Shampoo - 52.95DKK / 7.1€
Elvital Hyaluron Pure Shampoo - 67DKK / 8.98€
5 Begin Your Natural Hair Journey
Now, you are all set to start your Natural Hair Journey. We recommend building a consistent hair care routine, just like you have a skin care routine.
Here is a basic routine you can follow, but you should adjust some of the steps to your unique hair features for optimal results.
Basic Hair Care Routine
Cleanse: Clean your scalp with a sulfate-free shampoo. Focus on the scalp and roots only. Use a scalp massage for a few minutes to promote blood circulation and hair growth.
Condition: Apply a conditioner from mid-shaft to the ends, not the roots. Use a hair masque once a week for deep moisturization.
Detangle: Gently detangle your hair when wet and conditioned, unless you have straight hair. Use a detangling brush, wide-tooth comb, or your fingers.
Dry: Dry your hair with a microfiber towel or T-shirt to avoid frizz. If you want to blow dry your hair, set the hair dryer on low-medium heat and speed, always apply heat protection beforehand.
Protect: Protect your natural hair while sleeping with a silk bonnet or silk pillow to minimize frizz and breakage.
6 Be Patient
Transitioning to NHJ and achieving natural beautiful hair can take time... Some people see results after one wash and others take 1-2 months. It all depends on the state of your hair and your hair features - some are easier to manage.
Be consistent, be patient, and do not give up!
Advanced Natural Hair Journey
You have successfully followed step 1-6 of NHJ and want to take your hair care routine to the next level, then these tips are for you.
7 Natural Curls Styling
If you have wavy, curly, or coily hair, we encourage you to embrace your natural beautiful hair. If you have a slight S-shape in your hair, you may have hidden curls. Assemble a NHJ bundle of styling products to level up your natural curls and follow this basic routine.
Basic Curl Styling Routine
Hair Wash: Follow step 1-3 from the “Basic Hair Care Routine” further up.
Moisture: If you have high porosity, curly, coily, and/or coarse hair, your hair tends to be drier, so add a leave-in conditioner for extra moisture.
Define: Use a curl cream to help define the shape of your curl pattern. If you have medium-high density, apply the cream in sections. Opt to use a brush to evenly distribute the curl cream and reduce any wet frizz (wet frizz will turn to dry frizz). Scrunch your hair to activate the curl cream.
Hold: Finish off with a gel or mousse for long-lasting curls. If you have low density, wavy, or fine hair, mousse is generally recommended to add more volume. However, a gel will give a more defined result and last longer. Scrunch again to mix the product with the water in your hair and form a uniform gel cast.
Plop: Always use a microfiber towel or t-shirt to dry your hair, as regular towels create frizz. If you have wavy or curly hair, (dry) plop your hair by piling your curls on top of your head and tying the microfiber towel or t-shirt around them to maintain their springy and defined shape while drying. Leave it on for 15-30 minutes. However, if you have coily hair you should micro plop instead - also applicable for wavy and coily hair. Gently scrunch small sections of your hair with the microfiber towel or T-shirt to remove access water and enhance the springy shape.
Dry: You can either air dry or diffuse your curls. Diffusing gives you more volume and shrinkage, however, heat damages your hair, so the most healthy option for your hair would be air drying. If you choose to diffuse, use low-medium heat and speed, always apply a heat protector beforehand.
8 Scalp Care
Healthy hair starts at the scalp, where it all grows. Just like you have a skin care routine, you should establish a scalp care routine tailored to your scalp type. For all scalp types, we recommend avoiding sulfates as they tend to strip too much of the natural oils from your scalp. Well, you already made this change when you joined NHJ - good job!
Read our thorough blog post on scalp types to create the best routine for your scalp. Here are some general advices. If you have an oily scalp, straight or wavy hair, you are prone to build-up so use a sulfate-free shampoo regularly. If you have a dry scalp, curly or coily hair, you suffer from dryness so wash less frequently and switch your shampoo with a cleansing conditioner (co-wash) and clarify every 4-5 washes with a sulfate-free shampoo to remove build-up.
9 Deep Condition Weekly
Deep conditioning is an amazing technique to deeply penetrate the hair shaft and restore your hair’s natural shine. This will reduce damage, breakage, and split ends. Embrace weekly deep conditioning to keep your hair moisturized and resilient.
To deep condition, wash and clean your hair with a sulfate-free shampoo, apply a hair masque, detangle gently, and…
Opt 1 (Low-Medium Porosity Hair): Wrap your hair in a shower cap and towel to create warmth, leave it on for 30 minutes, rinse, and style as usual.
Opt 2 (High Porosity Hair): Wrap your hair in a shower cap, leave it on for 5-10 minutes, rinse, and style as usual.
10 Restrain Heat Styling
Heat stylers like straighteners and curling irons are tempting problem-solvers to make your damaged hair look flawless. However, heat tools are a quick fix that dries your hair and lead to breakage. So leave your straighteners and curling irons behind and embrace your natural hair. If you must use heat, like blow drying, use the low or medium heat setting and always apply a heat protector beforehand.
11 Balance Moisture and Protein
Moisture is the essence of hydrated and elastic hair, while protein strengthens and repairs the hair. High porosity and fine hair thrive on medium-large proteins, while coarse hair benefits from smaller proteins. The moisture and protein level is difficult to balance and can easily lead to moisture or protein overload. A balanced hair is shiny, soft, frizz-free, bouncy, and doesn’t break easily - basically everyone’s hair goals.
Hair with moisture- or protein overload is not as pleasant:
Moisture Overload
Your hair feels overly soft, fluffy, mushy, and very elastic. Natural curls are less defined, limp, and frizzy.
Use products with protein until your hair is balanced. Pause your deep conditioning, use a conditioner and, leave-in conditioner/ curl cream with protein.
Protein Overload
Your hair feels stiff, crunchy, rough to the touch, and looks dull. Natural curls are more defined but very frizzy. You experience a lot of breaking and shedding.
Avoid products with protein and deep condition until your hair is balanced.
12 Cold Rinse
Finish of your hair wash with a cold rinse is very powerful for medium to high porosity hair. Porosity within this spectrum has more open and damaged hair cuticles making it difficult to retain moisture. Rinsing your hair in cold water will help close the hair cuticles and preserve the moisture.