HOW TO FINGER DETANGLE: FINGER DETANGLING 101 FOR AFRO COILY KINKY HAIR

I've been finger-detangling my hair almost exclusively for almost 2 years now. Matted roots? No. Time-consuming, I think not.  I do it regularly and love it.

How I finger detangle:

1.) I part my hair into 4/6 sections.

2.) Dampen or wet my hair with water and soak it in conditioner/oil/both. (Recently I've also taken to adding a tblspn of ACV to approximately 250ml of conditioner to calm down frayed cuticles)

3.) Then I position my head under the shower stream. The shower does a wonderful job of helping me push/flush most of the shed hair out. I don’t have a problem with matting, because I work my way upwards from ends to roots. Below is a pictorial of what I simply do. 

                                                      FINGER DETANGLING 101.

The Clap: Self-explanatory. This is a great smoothing method and also a quick means of gently pulling out shed hairs freely hanging within the other strands. I gently pull on the ends between my palms and work my way up. During lazy mid-week co-rinses I simply use this method, working with the gravitational push of the shower stream

The Separate: I believe is more popular and common. Better on dry/damp hair hair than wet hair. Here you piece apart the hair strands until you come across knots in between. When a knot is spotted you focus on the gently untangling that knot with some extra oil/detangler/slippy conditioner. Personally I don't do this too often as it really does take the longest time for me.

Here is another Type 4 Coily head finger-detangling with a virtually identical method and very similar hair texture to mine. - Earthy Delight.
                             


The Half-Rake: termed half by myself because I don't rake entirely through a section. I use my other hand to provide some tensile strength to my fragile strands and use the other to gently rake through starting from the bottom and working my way up, then switch to work on the other unraked side (Does that make sense). Obviously the other hand proves to be redundant as soon as I get closer to my scalp.

The Claw: I use this to gently pull out shed hair from the ends. Holding onto a section with my other hand for additional tensile strength and less strain on my fragile hair strands. I also use a similar method to fluff out my hair, with the exception of the other gripping hand when re-shaping 2nd day hair.

                     

After all that. Below is the end-result. 

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'Minging' looking shed hair.

The benefits for me and finger-detangling have been:

• A reduction in frayed ends, my ends looked thicker.
• A reduction in the number of  broken shorter strands I would see after each detangling session. 
• A much  better realization and understanding of her fragility and reactions to products. (
I can easily 'feel' how Dafro reacts to certain products as I use them). 
• General ease and simplicity in this method. It’s tremendously much easier to handle my hair, I don’t dread washing it - infact I look forward to it. It's another major reason why I am able to rock the wng style with ease.

So I guess finger-detangling/finger-combing works for me ; /

If you finger-detangle what technique works for you?