Do Protective Hair Styles Actually Protect Anything?

Are hairstyles like box braids, butterfly locs, and twists actually helping protect our hair or do they do more harm than good?

Over the past few years, it’s been a pretty hot topic to discuss whether protective styles are actually protecting anything. I feel like the reason that’s come into question is because some people have been seeing more hair loss than hair growth with such styles. I'm someone who has dealt with both broken off, split, and dry hair from dealing with box braids, but also being on the side of noticing extreme hair growth and length retention from the same style. 

I’m really glad I went through my own journey and figured out what wasn’t working for me, so I can hopefully help some of you when it comes to trying to troubleshoot something like this.

From my experience, the main reason I witnessed breakage and broken off hair from protective styles, like box braids, was because I wasn’t moisturizing my hair in between those styles, and I was doing back-to-back box braids. Not to mention, I was also using excessive heat while blow drying my hair to prep for the style.

Some may not understand the importance of moisturizing your hair while it’s in a protective style. People assume that just because your hair is a protective style that means you don’t have to maintain your hair while it's in the style. I saw the biggest difference in the breakage and hair loss in the shower when I started moisturizing my protective styles at least one to two weeks while they were in my head. I recommend using warm water and a good leave-in conditioner mixed in a spray bottle, spray that on your hair one to two times a week and make sure to fully dry your hair so that you don’t get any mold or mildew problems inside your style.

The other point was that you may just be doing the styles too frequently. I usually make sure there is at least a two-week period where I don’t have a style in when I was doing protective styles more consistently. Though, at a certain point I was under the impression that the more I put my hair into these protective styles, the more my hair would grow. Obviously, I was wrong because my hair was breaking off at an extreme rate while I was doing this because I was doing a combination of all three things wrong. I was blowdrying with excessive heat at least once every 3 to 4 weeks. I was doing back-to-back styles 12 months out of the year. And I wasn’t moisturizing my hair at all while it was in these styles. That caused my hair to basically freak out because it wasn’t getting any moisture, it was getting fried every month and it was giving me such extreme breakage. 

I didn’t regularly use a heat protectant when blow drying my hair and to be honest, I did not need to blow dry my hair every time I put my hair in the protective style because my hair was long enough to do it on stretched dry hair (like a braid out).

So, my advice to anyone who has been dealing with breakage or slower hair growth rate from protective styles is to limit the heat for the protective style as much as you can, give your hair at least a one-to-two-week break in between each protective style, and to moisturize your hair one to two times every week while it’s in that protective style. If you can do that for a few months, you should see a big difference in your hair quality and length. 

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