Use a special Dreadlock shampoo
When washing your dreads, it’s important to use the right shampoo.
Many shampoos made for “combable” hair are designed to make your hair soft and smooth, which makes sense for combable hair, but it’s exactly what you don’t want with Dreadlocks! If your hair gets too smooth, your dreads will have a harder time forming properly and becoming tighter and firmer over time, because your hair will be more likely to slip out of the dreads.
Dreadlock shampoos clean your dreads but also help your hair keep its coarse texture, which is exactly what it needs to continue locking well.
In this blog, you’ll learn more about the importance of special Dreadlock shampoos.
In the Dreadshop range, you’ll find shampoos from the brands Raw Roots and Dollylocks.
Not sure which scent to choose? We’ve written a blog for both Raw Roots and Dollylocks where we describe the different scents.
How often should you wash your dreadlocks then?
Alright, you’ve found a great Dreadlock shampoo, nice! But now you might be wondering: how often should you actually wash your dreads?
We recommend washing your real dreadlocks about once a week. Washing can cause more hairs to come loose from your dreads, and that’s exactly what you want to avoid when you’re wearing dreads.
It’s also better for your scalp not to wash your hair too often. We tend to think that the cleaner, the better but washing too frequently can actually throw your scalp out of balance. The more you wash, the more your scalp feels the need to produce sebum again, which can make it feel greasy faster.
Do you work out a lot? Or does your scalp get oily really quickly? Then washing your dreadlocks twice a week might feel better for you.
Or maybe you’ve noticed your scalp prefers it when you wash your dreads every two weeks? That’s totally fine too, as long as you wash your dreads regularly and find a routine that works for you.
Why is washing your dreads regularly important?
In the early stages of your dreads, there’s still a lot of air inside them, and they feel soft.
Over time, your dreads will become more compact as the hair starts to mat and tighten, causing the air to be pushed out.
For the maturing process, when your dreads become tighter and more compact, it helps if your dreads are clean. Combined with a dreadlock shampoo that gives your hair a slightly coarse texture, your hair will tangle more easily inside the dread. This helps your dreads gradually become firmer and more compact.
You’ll notice that especially during the first year, your dreads tend to feel a bit tighter after every wash. Washing is also the moment when you might spot new loops or bumps. These form as your dreads compress and may even shrink a little in length.
By palm rolling your dreads, you can reduce some of this looping and help shape them more evenly.
If you don’t wash your dreads often and your hair becomes oily, it will feel smoother, and smooth hair tends to slip past itself more easily, causing hairs to come loose from the dreads faster. Do you do wash your dreads regularly but don’t rinse the shampoo out properly? Then shampoo residue can get trapped inside your dreads. This can make them feel sticky or dirty and you might even see a white layer on your dreads, usually near the roots. That kind of build-up gets in the way of the locking process.
In this video, we show you how to wash your dreads the right way.
If you already have build-up in your dreads, we recommend doing a dread detox.
When your hair is oily or has shampoo residue in it, it will take longer for your dreads to mature. You’ll stay in that messy, fuzzy stage a bit longer.
