Removing the wax Adventure: my scenario

hi guys... im rather new to this community... I found it while searching for informations on dread maintainance, and by a lucky accident I found out that wax is noooo good... the problem is, I didn't know it! I had actually made my dreads 1 week before i found it out, and me and my freinds who helped me do it, we freaking SOAKED my hair in wax after backcombing... i'm from Brazil, and here we don't really have industrialized waxes, so what people communly uses is beewax (I don't actually know the difference between them, but whatever...).

this is a picture taken right after the crime was commited... see how i was happy... little did I know about the mess I had just done with my hair (I even had rubberbands...) :

(bleached hair, of course...)




well, then I got enlightned by this forum and realized that the one thing to do was to remove the wax ASAP! so i posted it on one of the sticky threads, asking for help... i searched the posts for cleansing mixtures e rinses and i found about the ACV and the baking soda "technics" and also some comment on using dish soap for removing wax. So as i didn't had any apple vinager and wasn't very sure about using baking soda, I tryed the dish soap... I did a test in a tip of the hair and it seemed to work very fine!! i dissolved the hole wax that was on the tip! so i just went crazy and spreaded a bunch o soap in the dreads... sat back for a while and went for a bath. As i was bathing, I realized that I dunno what reason, the soap just didn't make ANY effect this time... so I dicided to try a different strategy, still taking the bath, I turned the hot water and used a LOT of the Anti-residue shampoo I bough before making the dreads. I started to feel the wax softening (probably because of the hot water) and began to rip it off my hair with my fingers... some junks were really easy to pull off, others not so much... anyway, after a long time taking the easy junks, i realized that i couldn't get anymore off of my hair, at least in that time (it was starting to hurt my nails). I then looked at the mirror, and realized a LOT of the wax had come out... but still there were some crusts of it in the surface of the hair, and I still can feel a lot of wax in the inside of most locks.

well, heres the resume: My dread is 2 weeks old, done by backcombing and waxing. I removed some of it sunday, the last time I washed it. Still there are some crusts and some "inside" wax, though as my locks are very young, the "inside" is not such a hidden place =P
here as some pics of them in their present situation:


(it does have a very dirty aspect... but it's a price for being ignorant heh)


Well, I plan on doing a baking soda "session" tomorrow, followed by a good hair washing in the bath, and depending on the results I'll try an ACV session thursday (if I can get an apple vinager)...

I planned on posting this tonight so that anyone could give any kind of advice or best whishes (heh) before I do it tomorrow, maybe suggest a better way of doing it or just comment my "adventure" heh... anything!... I really want my dreads to come out healthy and waxless... I really intend on keeping them, though I don't discard the idea of cutting it now if I fail in removing the wax and wait till my hair grows again so that I can dread in a better way =P
thanks guys
(and sorry for the pics size... I'm not very experienced on editing pictures)

 

Aww dear, I couldn't read this and not respond. I think that the best thing you can do is if the wax is hard, like candle hard, use cold water and try to harden it and get it out in chunks. If it's soft, you might can melt it using hot water (not enough to burn yourself). I certainly will be thinking of you. What are you going to do with baking soda?

 

this:
http://www.hipforums.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=159206

and thanks for replying! =)

 

your going to have an awesome dread-hawk.....even if there is a lil wax in em

 

The post-wax pics look great. An ACV rinse should do the trick for you.

 

Awesome! How is everything going?

 

It took me a while to get my wax out too! It came out eventually though and my hair felt much better.

 

The baking soda thing didn't work out very much... tought I didn't had the exact amount of ingredients...
anyway, each bath I take I feel I have less wax... I turn on the hot water and just take the wax off with my finger-nails... it takes a while and sometimes it's not much, but eventually I think the wax will be no more.
thanks everyone!

 

ok..thats classic
when people discuss the wax issue this picture should stop the arguments in theyre tracks
i mean i always think of wax dreads as candles but these look more like sticks or something
but i bet if u lit the end of 1 it'll burn for hours

too many ppl are falling for the wax scam & i think we should makle a thread & carefully wordx it so that it will come up higher in search engines then all the pro wax sites just to help avoid so many misadventures
its almost daily that someone finds us a week too late & hasta deal with a masssive mess like this

good luck on the cleanup..be glad youve only got a few short ones or u could be looking at months of work

 

thanks soaringeagle! I agree with you... if only I had found this forum before those evil dread-stores sites I wouldn`t be having this trouble with my hair, and I guess the thing about dreadlocks it`s almost the opossite of caring about hair =P
I wish the process of cleasing my hair goes well, so that, who knows, in maybe 1 or 2 months I`ll be proud to post a picture of my dreads =)

 

^ I think the most important thing to do to your dreads is just to make sure that they dont grow together in sizes that are too big for your liking