so over the past few months ive scoured the last probably about 100 pages of this forum reading pretty much most of the all the threads. ive liked dreads for as long as i can remember, and wanna try them out! so im planning on backcombing sometime within the next week or so. so just to make sure im doing it efficiently, heres the plan. 1.have a few friends over to help me backcomb 2. ill probably just end up using your standard plastic comb, but the thinner closer bristled end. some people claim that the little reeeaaallly closely bristled metal combs ( flea combs) are the best, but i figure that most backcombing is going to partially fall out so it doenst really matter what kinda comb is used( whats everyones opinion on that) 3. im shooting for thickness a little thinner than a average sharpie marker, and ive got some pretty annoyingly thick hair, with dreads just sorta backcombed randomly across, no grid or sectioned pattern or nothin 4. ive been washing my hair with baking soda for months now so ill just continue doing that, ill probably start adding a few trops of tea tree oil into the bottle though. my hair is pretty long, its all evenly about two inches past my nipples so thats plan. no wax or nothin. probably aloe from time to time and little bit of crocheting everynow and again, but thats the plan! im pretty freakin excited. any opinions or tips/hints would be greatly apperciated!
don't crochet, just backcomb and leave it to do it's thing. I had mine crochetted, but I kinnda wished they were just backcombed, when left alone it locks up pretty much by itself with less damage, maybe a few dips in the ocean?! That always helps.
If you've got thick hair, a plastic comb will probably not work.. I'd really buy a fleecomb, otherwise you'd better just go natural.
you say your aiming for a certain thickness but in my experience that would be quite difficult, when I backcombed the resulting "dreads" wern't much thicker than a sharpie marker and they have grown into fatties almost as thick as my wrist, so you kind of get what your given unless you backcomb them uber thin.
i used a fork to take mine out.. =[ but yes,, plastic combs will break,, i used metal 'dread' combs that came with my KBoy kit thing,, but a flea/nit comb will do =]
thick as your wrist? DAMN! so yeah, pretty much everything i can think of has been said here. plastic combs will probably break after a while especially with thick hair. buy a flea comb instead of those expensive hair combs, you're only going to use it once. probably don't want to crochet, someone just posted how they ripped a chunk of hair out doing that.
thanks for the help and info. ill go look for some flea combs! ill guess ill just backcomb and see what happens, thats the exciting part!
How much different is a flea comb than a fork? EXCEPT that a fork is free and it won't cause as much damage and breakage.
the space between the "teeth" lol maybe you could get like two or three forks, and stagger the teeth so that theres less space between them
Well obviously !!!! But being that they're so close it's going to break your hair more. Mine and the 3 other heads I dreaded came out pretty fantastic. Not that I'm promoting backcombing at all because after 5 years I wish I would've let them do their own thing. Good luck with your journey either way!!!
