Trimming LOOSE HAIR from dreads?!

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Loose hairs, they can be annoying, right? I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking that. Everyone seems to be looking for ways to deal with their loose hairs, whether it’s products, maintenance or the power of positive thought. A question that comes up is: can you simply cut those loose hairs?

Right, first off I’m going to break down loose hairs into two types - hair that is growing loose from the scalp, so hair that is not attached to any particular deadlock, and hair that is growing loose out of the body of a dreadlock.

Let’s talk about the stuff that’s growing loose straight from your scalp first. Basically these are the hairs that haven’t found their place yet. If your long term goal is to get those hairs locked up, don’t trim them. The shorter you make those hairs, the longer it’s going to take for them to get locked up. Sure, trimming them will give you some short term relief - out of sight, out of mind, right?… but the thing about hair is… it grows back. I used to trim the loose hairs around my hairline… for a short while it seems fine… but it won’t take long before you realise that when the hair is short, it’s not going to get knotted up… and so if you want to get that hair locked away, whether naturally or with assistance from maintenance… you’re going to have to grow it back out again to a reasonable length… and my own personal experience with that is… the awkward phase of growing those loose hairs back out again is even more annoying than the original loose hair length that I had in the first place - at least I could wrap or tuck the loose hair when it was long… when it’s growing back out again it’s completely useless. So, if you want that loose hair locked, my advice would be to resist the urge to trim it.

Now I’ll touch briefly on loose hairs that are growing out of the body of an existing dreadlock - so these are hairs that at the root level have already found their place, but you’ve got hair ends sticking out of the body of a dread, making it look messy. Now I’m not going to encourage anyone to go round pruning their dreadlocks, especially if the dreadlocks aren’t mature yet - if they’re still immature then they’ll have more tightening and changing to do on their own. But loose hairs growing out of the body of a mature dread… you can trim those without much risk of negative repercussions. Some of those loose hairs will get locked down on their own if you leave them long enough… some of them will just get broken off through daily abrasions. If there’s a patch that you find particularly annoying and it’s been there a while… trimming could be an option.

So, to conclude, when you’re locking hairs, the longer the hair, the better and so trimming the hairs unnecessarily isn’t going to help much in the long term… but if you’ve got hairs that are already locked in, growing out of dreadlocks that are already mature, trimming COULD be ONE of the options you could POTENTIALLY look into, POTENTIALLY.