Do you consider your SSKs as 'damage' and get a trim/cut when you have an abundance of them
OR
Do you simply ignore them and carry on with your life?
Has anyone noticed the appearance of SSKs decrease once hair has gotten longer? I'm really praying this happens. I think a good part of the reason I stay stuck at SL is my SSKs. I've gotten an influx recently after straightening, I did not blow dry my hair straight enough before flat-ironing. Trying to search and destroy but there are A LOT.
It really depends.
I personally don’t consider SSKs as damage. Simply because it’s more to do with my texture, as to why they form. I can get them all the way at my roots where the hair is still rather Virgin, espeacially if no relaxer has touched any strands.
I’ve also noticed that for me, shedding typically is the main culprit of SSKs. I’ll separate them down to the last strand and it the last one usually is a shed hair that’s decided to wrap itself around a group of hairs.
However, I don’t just ignore them and go about my day. I’ll sit there for however long it takes to get them separated. I use a sewing needle for those extremely tight ones so I rarely snip them if I find them. Which is on a bit of a weekly basis. Maybe once every odd numbered months I’ll find a knot that can’t be saved so I’ll snip those 1-3 hairs that are caught.
I don’t get a trim if I find an abundance of them. As stated before I don’t consider them damaged. But I noticed an added protein treatment helps. And cones in the form of some type of serum. Oil does the trick, but I use my oils more for coating than anything else.
As my hair gets longer, they appear more and more frequently to be honest with you. However that may just be me and my hair texture. Because even when I was natural, they just popped up frequently as my hair grew longer. I have extremely fine strands and more often than not my hair just floats around as a whole, if I have it loose. I wish it had a bit more weight to it so that the strands can hang a bit heavier due to gravity being....well, gravity. I’ve noticed that even at this length the longest parts of my hair don’t really hang, they kind of just float and drift around each other and it typically leads to knots and tangling. So I keep my hair up pretty much all day every day, but wash day where I let my hair air dry, they just....fluff and float as they dry lol.
I think people with a thicker diameter of individuals hairs probably don’t have that problem much, if at all. Overall density probably is something to factor in as well. I have quite a bit of density to my hair, coupled with it being delicately fine. Even when it’s sopping wet, and I have it clipped up, I can still barely feel my hair on my head.
Blow drying, or just standing in front of a very powerful fan to speed up air drying helps a lot versus having damp hair, at least for me when it comes to knots. If my hair is dry the shed strands tend to come out one by one, since most of them get stuck around the first 15-20inches of hair that I have. It’s also where my hair starts to taper mostly from the breakage that’s caused by that over the years. If my hair is damp they clump together which catches them all in some type of ball, but still irritates me a lot.
I kind of just deal with it because my shedding rate and growth rate are both waaaaaaaay up there. Espeacially when protective styling for some odd weeks, and then I take whatever style it is, down. One one hand i protective style to preserve my hair, on the other hand, I try to tend to my scalp to ease the shedding and sensitivity. Sometimes it helps for several days to stretch my washes, and sometimes I’m fed up with letting the shedding build up so I’ll take two days or so to sepearate every last strand or wash more frequently so that the water flow can help detangle my hair more often.
So I’d say it depends again. At longer lengths they may decrease, or increase. I think hair diameter, and density play an important role too, as well as how much shed hair you have on a daily and weekly, and even monthly basis.