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Well, how do you get dreads with dread perming. Well, first I would like to say that dread
perming can be done for a number of different reasons. I'll give you two. The first is you
can, depending on the texture of your hair, if your texture tends to be a little coarse,
you can do this process of dread perming to kind of even out and smooth out your texture.
Another reason to do dread perming is to promote more lockage. You want the hair to really
lock and when you perm the hair and you do this dread perming as you get the runoff,
as you rinse out the actual chemical, the hair and the chemical kind of just lock together
and that causes you to get a tighter lock on a softer texture of hair.
But the process itself is sometimes not always recommended and is not the best thing for
a dread lock style, because dread locks are supposed to be natural. But there are some
that like to have a more polished natural lock, so this might be a process for them.
You first start out with using a relaxer known as a thioglycolic acid.
There are many different kinds of perms and relaxers, but this one is particular is more
of an alkaline way of relaxing the hair. I like to refer to it as it is the step before
you perm with a permanent wave or the step before smooth out of straighten or as the
step before you curl on a "jerry curl." So what you do is you take the thioglycolic acid
and you do the first part of it which is where it rearranges the bonds and it kind of breaks
the hair down.
It swells the cuticle layer and breaks the bonds of the hair down. Then once that chemical
is actually smoothing the hair and breaking it done, that's when you go into your rinse
out stage and you rinse the whole thing out. In the process of rinsing, because with dread
locks the beautiful thing about them is they don't shed, because you don't comb your hair.
So all of that everyday shedding that you would normally get when you comb your hair,
it stays in your locks with dread locks. So with the dread perming as you're rinsing out
the permanent solution that shedding starts locking in with the permed dread lock a little
more quickly. It gets softer, so now it's able to kind of push its way down a little
further into the lock.
You think of that new growth that's closer to the root starts sliding its way down further
into the lock and the lock gets a little thicker. It starts locking in a little tighter. After
you rinse out the perm solution, you neutralize and you either twist or dry depending on what
type of style you are doing afterwards, but that is pretty much the process of doing a
dread perming. Again, it's for if you want to smooth out the texture of your hair or
if you want to get your dread locks to lock up a little bit faster.