Recent hair discoveries

Since going natural I've become the ultimate diy-er. I do a lot of research on good hair practices and I get tons of tips and good info from forums, hair blogs and video sharing sites. With all that said, some things are learned purely through trial and error.
One of the most common hairstyles you'll find in natural hair are twists and twistouts. I personally LOVE twists. I am obsessed with them so you must understand that when I wasn't able to achieve a good set on my own hair I was rrally bothered. But as you will see I had many strikes against me.

* First of all my hair doesn't stay twisted in the back. About 10 minutes after I twist them they start to unravel. Whoever said that natural hair doesn't unravel didn't know my hair. I didn't want to use rubberbands and I tried for a long time to figure something else out but I eventually had to. That resolved that issue and you can barely even tell. Nothing too hard.

* Next, my hair would look beautiful in twists but once I'd untwist them for a twist out it would look like locs. Very coiled. It is actually beautiful, just not the look I was going for. Well at some point I realized what the problem was. I do kinky twists sometimes and when doing these there is a little bit of a difference in technique. You must twist the hair as you are twisting it. If that doesn't make sense I'm sorry. I'd have to dedicate a whole post and a video to that. Anyway, I somehow had started using that technique even when doing regular twists. So in other words. I was twisting too hard. Lol. I should really be embarrassed about that one but I'm just happy to finally get a REAL twistout. Well then another problem arose.

* My twistouts would frizz out after like 2 hours. Seriously! I went through the agony of leaving these twists in (beautiful as they are) for like 3-4 days just for them to frizz up in hours. All definition GONE. BTW: I say agony because for some odd reason if I have twists or braids in my hair I NEED to take them down so I can see the definition. I don't know if that makes sense but there must be atleast one person out there who understands where I'm coming from. But back to the matter at hand...and this is a HUGE discovery. For me anyway. I really struggled with this one. I didn't know what was wrong. I realized that the glycerin mix that I use on my hair was causing my hair to frizz out. One day when I had run out of mix and was being lazy I left that out of my routine. Magically, my hair didn't frizz out. I had a real twistout that lasted for several days!!! It makes total sense though since glycerin is a humectant, meaning it attracts moisture to your hair. I dont know that all humectants would cause frizz but glycerin does for me. So while I love love love my glycerin mix and will always use it for other things I won't be using it when I want a braid out or twist out.

I hope this helps someone as much as it helped me. I no longer have any issues with twistouts and braid outs and it only took me like 2 years to figure it out. Lol. But seriously, as I stated earlier I've learned so much from others who have documented their hair journeys and have made their own discoveries through trial and error. I hope that I am doing that for someone else.